It was an honour to speak with other Fathom users and experts during the Quarter Hour session with Fathom earlier this month. Here’s what happened.
Earlier this month, Prevail was invited to speak at a lunchtime awareness-raising session at Fathom. Kasia spoke to other Fathom users during the fifteen-minute lunchtime session: The Quarter Hour.
Prevail is a long-time user and proponent of Fathom. We frequently deploy it on behalf of our clients in the construction industry. This Quarter Hour session gave us an opportunity to discuss why and explain some best practice tips for using the software.
What is Fathom?
Fathom is a cloud-based software application that offers all-in-one reporting, analysis and forecasting. It combines insightful reporting, fast cash flow forecasting and actionable financial insights into one refreshingly easy business management solution.
The Prevail team is tightly embedded in the Xero financial software ecosystem – of which Fathom is also a part. Fathom offers tight integration with the Xero accounting software. Connecting Xero with Fathom is simple; you can connect your data to enable Fathom’s features in a couple of clicks.
The benefits? Fathom’s Xero integration combines actionable insights, custom reports and fast cash flow forecasts in one powerfully simple solution. We believe strongly in its ability to present financial information in a clear and accessible way. That’s why Prevail Accountancy has become a Fathom Certified Advisor.
The Quarter Hour segment
Fathom has an important role to play for SMEs. The Prevail team’s use of Fathom helps us to fill a significant reporting gap for small and mid-size construction industry businesses. Typically, standard monthly reporting focuses on tracking gross profit margin from month to month. However, we have found that construction industry businesses require a greater level of granularity.
That’s where Fathom comes in. The Fathom reporting tools enable us to track gross profit margin per project as well as the overall business total. This is vital for construction industry businesses. If you are running five or six projects in parallel, it is possible that one or more of them could be running at a loss – even when your overall gross profit margin looks healthy. Without per-project gross profit tracking, you might not spot these losses until they have become a serious problem.
During the Quarter Hour segment, Kasia shared her advice about why real-time, per-project gross profit margin tracking is so important for construction industry businesses. She also explained how to use tracking categories in Xero to make per-project gross profit margin reporting possible in Fathom. Instead of using Xero projects, this approach – leveraging the Fathom integration – delivers the granularity of per-project reporting needed.
Questions from the Fathom audience
The lunchtime session flew by – it’s amazing how much information it’s possible to pack into one short, fifteen-minute session!
The Quarter Hour closed with questions from the audience. We really loved the opportunity to engage with other Fathom users. In particular, people were interested to see that gross profit margins could be reported separately for projects without the need for separate bank accounts.
Questions included how to review the budget and forecast in a similar per-project way – which we were happy to explain could be achieved by using the Xero tracking categories and Fathom.
We also discussed the difficulties of accurately attributing overheads, including waged employee costs. It is much easier to allocate the direct costs of contractors, materials, etc. using this approach.
In addition, we discussed how flexible the solution is – there are options to set budgets in either Fathom or Xero. If you’ve already built a budget Xero, you can use that as the basis for your budget reporting. Alternatively, Fathom also gives you the option to build a budget directly in Fathom. One of the real advantages of the close integration between the two systems is that it offers a great deal of flexibility in approach.
Kasia said, “It was a real pleasure to have so many fellow accountants and fellow Fathom users turn up to hear and discuss our experiences and insights. I’d really like to thank our partners at Fathom for the opportunity to share our experiences.”
Would you like more granular financial performance tracking?
If you’re a construction industry business which doesn’t currently have the level of granularity needed in your financial reporting to track profitability on a per-project basis, we can help.
Get in touch with our team to learn more about using Fathom, integrating with and using Xero and how Prevail can support.
Call us: 01706 550 825
Email us: office@prevailaccountancy.co.uk
