How moving from Excel to Fathom gave our clients an understanding of their numbers in minutes!

We interviewed Pat Nash, Advisory and Insights Team Leader at Moore Kingston Smith about his experience with Fathom. In this case study, we hear: 

• How the team improved their clients’ understanding of their numbers, compared to when it was presented in Excel.  
• How to foster a two-way conversation, which encourages clients to ask questions because they understand their numbers.  
• How Fathom empowered the financial team to dive deeper into clients' business goals, leading to more insightful discussions and better recommendations. 
• How these changes have resulted in the team winning more work from their clients.  
  
  

“Our clients have responded really well to the visualisations in Fathom. Like a graph showing revenue over a period as opposed to a bunch of numbers in Excel, it gets our clients understanding their financial picture instantly,” says Pat. 

 “It's a no-brainer, Fathom just enhances your ability to have those conversations with clients, I don't see why anyone doing my job wouldn't want to do that.” 

The company  

Moore Kingston Smith is a multidisciplinary top 10 firm with offices across the UK. Pat works in the outsourcing department, which helps clients make better business decisions through management accounts, forecasting and budgeting.  

The challenge  

We're all about providing insights to our clients. We were using Excel which can do this, but it's very hard to use with a non-financial person. We found that a lot of our clients wanted management information, but when we presented it in Excel they didn't fully understand what the numbers we were showing.  

We would send management accounts out in Excel, and ask, ‘do you have any questions?’ ‘are there any queries?’ We didn't get a lot of responses. Once we got underneath the skin of it, we found a lot of the business owners we were working with didn't know what they were looking at.  

Our clients are busy, they don't have time to look in depth line by line at a spreadsheet and figure out, what does that mean?  They would just put the report to one side and never get around to looking at it.  

The solution   

The solution lies in Fathom's ability to quickly produce reports in a visual format that makes financial information easy to understand.  

Tailoring the reports for all our clients has never been easier. We have templates for different service lines in different sectors, we just duplicate them, so we're not rebuilding for every client. We can quickly tweak the visuals to each client's needs, which speeds up our time because we can produce within several clicks.  

We can connect a client up to Fathom, run that template, and we've got a draft there ready to discuss.  

Fathom is great for a three-way forecast as well, which enables us to have those conversations with clients about any future pinch points around cash or any other elements important to them.  

The results 

1. Clients understand their numbers

We found using Fathom they understand the numbers fully within a ten-minute slot. We know they understand because they’re asking questions now like, ‘why is that number down?’ 

We can summarise key data very simply in Fathom. We use headlines like, ‘what's your gross profit, year to date?’, ‘what was the budgeted gross profit?’ etc. It paints that picture very clearly, very quickly and then we can start talking about why. 

Being able to present data to clients that they can easily understand, has just increased the level of conversation that we weren't previously having with our clients. 

Even just a simple graph that shows a trend line, it’s just so much easier to understand what's happening when you can see it visually. Then clients ask ‘Why?’, ‘What can we do?’ ‘Can we look at a price increase?’ etc. Those are the conversations we’re having now and we're diving deep into our clients' businesses, which is great.   

We found when our conversations improved and clients understood we could help, they then started asking, ‘can you do our tax planning?’ or ‘I want to step down in two years, can you help with that?’.  

All those requests come from working with the business on a regular basis with Fathom reports. It's been really beneficial.  

Are you sure you still want to use spreadsheets?  

There’s a better way. Simplify complex data for clients, and take them through the insights that matter. Try Fathom for free. 

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