Comparison
Databoat and Spotlight Reporting
Spotlight Reporting is a reporting and forecasting suite aimed at accounting practices doing advisory work, with a strong following in franchise and multi-entity reporting.
What Spotlight Reporting is good at
Built for advisory, not just reporting
Forecasting, cash flow, scenario work and a genuinely well-regarded franchise product. If you are selling advisory services on top of the numbers, that is what it is designed for.
Strong multi-entity handling
Consolidation across entities on the same ledger is well trodden ground for them.
Practice-shaped pricing
The entry plan covers ten client organisations, which suits a practice buying once for everyone rather than paying per client.
The ledger connects; the rest stays yours
Spotlight’s strength is what it does after the data is in a shape it recognises. Getting a regional POS export, a wholesale portal download or a client’s hand-kept spreadsheet into that shape is still a manual job, done monthly, by you. Databoat starts one step earlier: a model reads the file before anything has been conformed, and the arithmetic after that is compiled code.
Price, side by side
Spotlight Reporting · Ten client organisations
$295 / month
Databoat · Ten client organisations
$300 / month
Almost identical at ten. Spotlight has no single-business tier at all, so if you report on one entity their entry price is still the ten-organisation plan, where ours is $39.
Which one you should pick
Stay with Spotlight Reporting if
- Advisory and forecasting are the product you sell, not monthly reporting.
- You report on franchise networks, which is a particular strength of theirs.
- Your clients are ledger-connected and the data arrives in a usable shape already.
Look at Databoat if
- You report on one business, where their entry plan is ten organisations and ours is one.
- The sources you need have no integration and never will.
- You want the joining, not the presentation, taken off your desk.
Or both
The same pattern as Fathom: Databoat handles the exports nothing reads and hands over conforming data, and you keep the reporting tool your clients already recognise.
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 If something here is out of date or unfair, say so and we will correct it.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.