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18 Jul, 2023
Say hello to divisional budgets in Fathom; the ultimate tool to ensure your divisions are on track.
Now you can easily gain insights into the performance against budget of the divisions, departments, locations, profit centres, cost centres, business units or other segments within your business.
This new feature is currently available for Xero and QuickBooks Online companies, and offers a comprehensive solution to import, track and compare divisional budgets.
Specifically, the new divisional budget features enable you to:
- Compare financials to budget for divisions in reports
- View a side-by-side comparison of budgets for multiple divisions
- Use your divisional budget data to track the performance of KPIs
- Analyse your divisional budget data in Fathom's Breakdown tool
- Xero users: calculate an overall budget from the sum of tracking category budgets
- For QuickBooks Online users: import budgets across multiple financial years, and use hierarchical divisions for both class and location
See Divisional Budgets in action by watching the overview video below.
Read on to see what the key features and benefits could mean for you, your business or your clients.
Staying on track with divisional budget data in reports
Go deep, go wide—compare divisional actuals to budgets in reports, side-by-side. This offers a quick way to identify discrepancies, so you can seamlessly begin planning to rectify. You can also use divisional budget data in tracking the performance of KPIs, making it easier to uncover insights.
The Breakdown chart helps you analyse the performance of your divisions, and to track actuals against budgets.
Budget for divisions into the future
Great Scott! You can now import divisional budgets for forward projections and planning, to ensure all sections of your business are prepared for the road ahead (no DeLoreans required).
If you’re using Xero, the ability to import budgets for each tracking category means that you can now also aggregate those divisional budgets to create an overall company budget.
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For QuickBooks Online users, when you import an overall budget with subdivisions, the budget data will be available to report on in Fathom at a divisional level. In addition, you can now import budgets for future financial years.
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Improved budgeting workflows for Xero users
Fathom's divisional budget import is a game changer for Xero budgeting workflows. Fathom imports your tracking category budgets and aggregates them into one overall budget which can be exported to Excel. We've done the heavy lifting by ensuring that the file can then be easily imported back into Xero for quick reconciliation. No sweat!
Additionally, if you’ve imported divisions as standalone companies, you can use Fathom to forecast financials for these divisions and save the forecast as a budget. This budget can be easily uploaded to Xero via Excel, enabling you to see your forecast in Xero.
Multiple budgets across time for QuickBooks Online
To help make the complex simple, instead of choosing the budget for a single financial year, we’ve enabled you to import budgets for multiple financial years from QuickBooks Online into a single Fathom company. Choose what you need, when you need it.
Supporting hierarchical class and location data for QuickBooks Online
With this update, QuickBooks Online users can now import entire hierarchical structures and have finances and budgets.
This feature ensures an easier workflow and accurate budgeting for businesses with complex financial structures.
Using divisional data in formulas and KPIs
If you’re looking to gain insights into performance and make data-driven decisions—you guessed it—you can use your existing formula KPIs to track the performance of your divisions against their budgets.
An example of divisional budgets in action
You run a company operating a chain of hardware stores. You use Xero, where you have set up tracking categories for store locations. You opened a store at the beginning of the financial year in a new location across town. You’ve budgeted for the new store to perform such that it will break even after one year and start turning a profit the following year.
At the start of the year, you created some management reports in Fathom which included the budget for the new location.
Now, twelve months later, you’re looking at your financial results compared to the original budget. It’s easy to see that you’ve exceeded your revenue projections—the new store has broken into profitability four months ahead of schedule! With this intel, you’ve decided to direct the early profits back into some required maintenance of your original site earlier than expected, improving the in-store experience for employees and customers.
If you're ready to start using divisional budgets in Fathom, simply log in here, or you can sign up to start a 14-day free trial with Fathom, no credit card required.
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