Comparisons
Written for people who already pay for one of these.
Each of these tools does something well, and each page says what. They also all work the same way underneath: connect the ledger, and hand everything else back to you. That last part is the only thing we do differently, and it isn’t worth switching for unless it’s the part costing you the time.
Every price and quotation is from published material and linked at the foot of each page. Where we are more expensive, the page says so.
Databoat and Fathom
Everything that is not the ledger is still your problem
An honest comparison. Fathom is the most established reporting tool for accounting firms and does its job well. It also requires you to restructure any non-ledger data into its own template first — which is the step Databoat exists to remove.
Ten client companies · $205–260 / monthREAD →Databoat and Spotlight Reporting
The ledger connects; the rest stays yours
An honest comparison. Spotlight is built for advisory work and franchise reporting, and prices for practices rather than single businesses. Like every tool in the category it anchors on the ledger and treats a spreadsheet as the fallback you conform to.
Ten client organisations · $295 / monthREAD →Databoat and Joiin
You still do the mapping
An honest comparison. Joiin goes further toward the multi-source problem than most — Xero, QuickBooks, Sage and spreadsheets, from $23 a month — and is the best value in the category. It still asks you to map the chart of accounts by hand.
A small group · from $23 / monthREAD →
Early access
Tell us the report you rebuild
Early access opens practice by practice. Tell us the report you rebuild every month and the files behind it. If it’s close to something we already handle, we’ll ask for a sample and set you up on your real data. If not, we’ll say so plainly rather than park you on a list.