Your Favorite Orange County Bookkeepers on Cool Tech Tools: Fathom
Patty Hansen
Do your eyes glaze over when presented with financial statements? If so, you’re not alone. Many entrepreneurs benefit from seeing their financial results in graphic and chart formats. Your favorite Orange County bookkeepers have recognized that it is sometimes easier to view your financial position with colorful bars and graphs instead of viewing the typical P&L and that is why we are introducing you to Fathom! Fathom is the perfect tool to help your numbers come alive so they can become meaningful to you.
Fathom is a company founded in 2011 based in Brisbane, Australia. Their product is a cloud-based software application that crunches accounting data and provides multiple views that make analysis easy. In accounting terms, we call this type of software by many names: Financial Dashboard; Key Performance Indicator (KPI) software, and Business Intelligence (BI) software.
Fathom can present your accounting data in multiple insightful views:
- KPI’s – Popular KPI’s are pre-loaded. You can also create and calculate your own. Fathom handles financial KPI’s like debt-to-income ratio. You can also enter non-financial data such as number of employees and customer satisfaction scores.
- KPI Explorer – This display takes on a wheel shape where green is good and red indicates room for improvement.
- Profitability – This line graph shows your business’s breakeven point.
- Cash Flow – This bar graph shows in red and green your cash balance fluctuations.
- Trend – This line graph allows you to see the direction account balances move over time.
- Goal Seek – This chart allows you to perform what-if analysis, set goals, and measure your progress.
You can also generate predefined or custom reports in Fathom. The reports can be scheduled as well as exported to Excel.
Fathom does require a setup process and integrates with QuickBooks Online, QuickBooks Desktop, Xero, and MYOB (which is popular in Australia). It’s also included in the Advanced version of QuickBooks Online. The steps to set up Fathom include:
- Updating the data, which is mostly done through integration setup
- Adding your company profile
- Mapping Fathom to your Chart of Accounts, which is a very common setup step
- Selecting your KPIs, which requires some strategy work on your part
- Setting targets
- Enabling alerts if desired
There’s a lot to like about Fathom. QuickBooks Online has recently advanced their software and packages to include Fathom reporting. If you feel like you’d like to start digging deeper into your business’s financial results to find opportunities for more growth and profit, then please contact your favorite Orange County Bookkeepers at Team One Accounting!
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