10th March, 2020
The amount of business intelligence data available today is incredible, but finding ways of processing that data into actionable insights can be difficult for small business owners without the assistance of a platform like Fathom.
Small businesses are often in a tough position when it comes to generating their own business insights, as they tend to generate much more data than they’re able to process. For this reason, there are solutions like Fathom.
And given Fathom can work in tandem with your accounting software to provide clarity into things like seasonal cash flow while also quickly serving up comprehensive management reports, and useful intel to help you stay ahead of the competition.
To discover a little more about this platform, we spoke with Allanah Miller, partner consultant at Fathom. The following is a transcript of that interview.
First, can you tell us a little of your own professional background and what led you to Fathom?
I started my career working in corporate tax with one of the big 4 accounting firms in the US but had always been interested in working for a startup or scale-up.
Once I decided to move back home to Australia, I knew I had the opportunity to do just that. The more I looked, the more I realised Fathom was the perfect fit and posed a unique and exciting opportunity to help accountants and businesses.
What unique skills, talents or expertise do you bring to the business? Are there any specific areas you’ve had to develop since joining?
Having an accounting background has proved incredibly valuable. It has meant that I’ve brought with me an understanding of how firms make decisions on changing their processes and delivering services.
I faced a steep learning curve moving into a SaaS business, as you’re exposed to so many different areas of the business. I’ve had to quickly learn about the way our development and product teams work, as well as marketing. It’s been a fresh and exciting challenge.
What do you most enjoy about the business?
For me, it’s all about the people and culture at Fathom. Fathom fosters a workplace filled with collaboration and opportunity, with a focus on solving people-centric problems. It’s this that attracts not only wonderful team members, but also customers.
There’s nothing more rewarding than seeing an accountant’s eyes light up when they realise that they can save time, and automate their monthly management reporting packs.
What can you tell us about the Fathom story? How did it come to be and what challenge was it trying to solve?
Fathom is an amazing team of designers, developers and business analysts. The headquarters is in Brisbane, Australia – but Fathom helps advisors and small business owners from all over the world with their reporting needs.
We also have offices in Seattle, United States and Cambridge, United Kingdom.
Starting as a collaboration between Daniel Walls, Geoff Cook and David Watson in 2010, Fathom continues to expand both its systems and team and is proud to be a people company.
Fathom’s goal is to transform the way people create beautiful management reports and access timely business insights. We’ve helped thousands of advisors and business owners around the world to gain the valuable insights they need to make better business decisions.
Are there any current challenges Fathom faces that you’re planning to overcome in the months ahead?
Without a doubt, we are living in an era of data ‘explosion’.
The volume of data and metrics that each business stores in the cloud apps which they use to run their business is increasing at an accelerating rate. This data can be used to provide business managers with insights. These insights help to answer key business questions and identify improvement opportunities. Yet many businesses still struggle to reap the benefits of data-driven decision making. Instead, they rely heavily on intuition and gut-feel decision making. Fathom helps businesses make sense of the data to improve their performance.
Fathom is always looking at ways to build out the product to better serve its customers.
One of the biggest challenges that businesses face is how to keep on top of their cash flow. To help with this, Fathom is developing some dynamic new cash flow forecasting tools to help businesses improve decision making and planning.
What does your customer base look like? What kind of range or variety of customers exists?
Because Fathom is a ‘horizontal’ reporting solution, it is used across all sorts of industries and for many different sized businesses. As a result, our customer base is incredibly varied.
We’ll see lots of savvy business owners and CFOs using Fathom to produce management reports. They benefit from working alongside an accountant or bookkeeper to get deeper insights for improved decision making.
Fathom is specifically designed for accountants and bookkeepers who are seeking to deliver more frequent and more engaging advisory and management reporting services. The advisors using Fathom appreciate a product that automates workflows, streamlines processes and provides new efficiencies. Templates, scheduled reporting, customisation, white labelling and client collaboration all contribute to better advisory offerings.
Have you ever had any feedback from customers who use both MYOB and Fathom in tandem? Any insights you can share of their experiences?
We work with over 1,000 MYOB users around Australia helping them to streamline their management reporting workflows and improve client conversations. We’ve recently worked alongside a large franchise group to help them benchmark and standardise reporting across the group, not only helping their franchisees understand how they can improve their profitability, but also helping the head office to have more insight into the operations of each store location.