How to Automate Fathom

Fathom is the report a business owner actually reads

Fathom takes the numbers out of an accounting system and turns them into something a person outside finance can act on. Plenty of people search for it as FathomHQ. It imports from QuickBooks Online and Desktop, Xero, MYOB, Sage, Excel and Google Sheets, then produces the management report, the KPI analysis, the cash flow forecast and the consolidation.

Three sorts of people live in it. Small and medium businesses use it to see how the month went. Accountants and bookkeepers use it to deliver advisory work, the half of the profession that is not compliance. Franchises and groups use it to rank thirty locations against each other on the same measures.

What it produces is the artefact that gets discussed. The board pack. The monthly pack a fractional CFO sends a client the week after close. The one-page scorecard pinned up in a franchise office. Those documents are how a company understands itself, so being a fortnight out of date matters more than it sounds.

Every board pack waits on a ledger somebody has to close

A report is only as true as the accounts under it, and the accounts are almost never ready.

Somebody is chasing a client to reconcile the bank feed. Somebody is waiting on a payroll journal. Somebody has to check the stock figure got posted before the pack goes out, because last quarter it did not and the gross margin chart was wrong in front of the board.

Then there are the numbers that were never in the ledger at all. Pipeline value from the CRM. Headcount from the HR system. Ad spend split by platform. Units sold on a marketplace. Occupancy, utilisation, billable hours, tonnes shipped. Each has a different owner, each sits behind a different login, and each gets typed into a spreadsheet once a month by somebody hoping they read the right row.

An advisory practice with forty clients does all of that forty times, in the same fortnight, every month.

Fathom

Non-financial KPIs filled without typing Ad spend, pipeline, headcount and units read from the systems that hold them and written where the import will pick them up.

Close readiness checked the day before Bank reconciled, payroll posted, nothing stranded in suspense, answered per client so the chasing happens before the deadline.

Covenants tested against the lender, not the model The balance read off the lender's own portal and compared with the forecast line, so a breach shows up in the forecast before it shows up in a letter from the bank.

Fathom reads the ledger it is connected to

Fathom automates a great deal of the assembly, and most firms use a third of it.

Scheduled Reports send the pack on a cadence without anybody clicking export. KPI Alerts fire when a measure crosses a line you set, so a margin or a covenant does not need a person watching it. The cash flow forecasting is three-way, covering profit and loss, the balance sheet and cash together, with scenario planning, driver-based forecasting and rolling forecasts on top. Consolidation handles multiple entities, currencies, eliminations, and even multiple source systems inside one group report.

All of that runs on data Fathom has imported, and Fathom imports from accounting systems.

That is the ceiling, and it is a real one. If the ledger is not closed, the schedule still sends and the report is confidently wrong. If a KPI needs the pipeline figure, somebody keys it in first, and the alert is only as fresh as that keying. If a covenant test needs the lender's own statement of the balance, there is no import for it. The analysis is automated. The gathering before it is not.

A KPI that is not in the accounts at all

The interesting measures in most businesses have never lived in a ledger.

Ad spend read from each platform's own dashboard every morning and written into the custom KPI beside revenue, so cost per acquisition is a line on the pack rather than a calculation done once a quarter. Pipeline and weighted forecast lifted out of the CRM the day before the board meeting instead of the week before. Headcount and starters from the HR system. Units sold and returned on each marketplace.

Close readiness is the other half. A check the day before the pack is due: are the bank accounts reconciled, has payroll been posted, is anything stranded in suspense, are there unreconciled items older than a month. Answered per client, across all forty, so the chasing happens before the deadline instead of during it.

Then the things a forecast should react to. This morning's bank balance against the forecast line. A covenant tested against the figure on the lender's portal rather than the one in the model. A large customer whose account has gone quiet. Fuel, freight or an input price that moved enough to change next quarter.

Report day stops depending on who has the logins

Every one of those figures is on a screen somewhere, and getting it into Fathom means a person opening a tab, reading a number and typing it into a spreadsheet the import picks up.

WebRun is an AI agent that works a real Chrome browser, signed in as you. It opens the ad platform, the CRM, the bank, the marketplace or the lender's portal, reads the figure, and puts it where Fathom will find it, on the morning of the day you need it.

It runs on your schedule in your own private environment, and each workflow is limited to the sites you name. Reports that go to a client, a board or a bank are drafted and left for a person, because a number that leaves the building is a number somebody is accountable for.

The workflows below are already built, and each one names what it opens.