Comparison

Databoat and Fathom

Fathom is a management-reporting and analysis tool for accounting firms, founded in Brisbane in 2011 and acquired by The Access Group in 2022. It sits on top of your ledger and turns it into client-ready reporting, KPIs and forecasts.

What Fathom is good at

It is genuinely good at the ledger

Connect Xero or QuickBooks and you get a polished, well-designed set of financial reports in minutes. If your reporting is a P&L, a balance sheet and a set of ratios drawn from one ledger, Fathom does that better than a spreadsheet ever will.

Fourteen years of depth

Forecasting, consolidation, benchmarking, alerts, its own AI commentary writer. It has had a long time to fill in the edges, and it shows.

A real company behind it

Thousands of accounting firms and a corporate parent. If longevity is part of your buying criteria, that is a fair point in its favour and not one we can match today.

Everything that is not the ledger is still your problem

Fathom accepts Excel, but not the file your client’s system actually produced. You restructure the export into Fathom’s template, apply its account classification codes, and define any non-financial KPI inside Fathom before you can upload a figure for it. Excel formulas do not come across at all — values only. That reformatting is the work, and it is exactly what Databoat does instead: a model reads the export as it actually came out, and you confirm what it found rather than conforming to a template.

“Users cannot simply upload raw accounting system exports; they must restructure their data to match Fathom’s predefined template format.”

Fathom help centre — importing financials from Excel ↗

Price, side by side

Fathom · Ten client companies

$205–260 / month

Databoat · Ten client companies

$300 / month

Fathom is cheaper at ten and decays much further at volume — roughly $59 per company at one and $13 at fifty. We are more expensive on purpose, because the price covers the step you are currently doing by hand.

Which one you should pick

Stay with Fathom if

Your clients are all on Xero or QuickBooks and the reporting comes out of the ledger.
You need forecasting and scenario modelling, which Databoat does not do.
You have fifty or more client companies, where their per-company price is far below ours.
You want a product that has existed for over a decade, today.

Look at Databoat if

A meaningful share of your clients run something with no connector and never will.
The reformatting in front of your reporting tool is the part that takes the time.
You need several sources joined together, not one ledger presented well.
You want the numbers frozen so month-on-month is genuinely comparable.
Fathom’s AI writes about data you conformed by hand. You would rather the model did the reading, and left the arithmetic to code.

Or both

The common case is both. Databoat reads the awkward exports, works out what is in them and hands over clean mapped data in the shape Fathom expects. You keep Fathom, your templates and your branding, and the Excel step in front of it disappears.

Where these figures come from

Prices are published list prices at the time of writing and change without telling us. If something here is out of date or unfair, say so and we will correct it.

Other comparisons

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.