Fathom Financial Analysis, Management & Reporting Blog

Introduction to Forecasting in Fathom for accountants

Written by Andrew Webb | 25 May 2021 1:18:51 PM

Our Forecasting 101 video series walks you through how to use Forecasting in Fathom; from setting up your first Microforecast, to how to develop a full Business Roadmap. We recently ran this series in the UK, but it's relevant for businesses globally.

When we designed forecasting, we wanted to radically rethink what forecasting could be, and how it could help advisors and businesses plan for the future. According to our research, accountants took around nine hours to build out a full three-way cash flow forecast for a client. Business owners, with deeper operational knowledge, might take even longer. Not only is that incredibly time-consuming, but any static forecast will be sliding out of date just four or five months later. Add in modelling alternative options and scenarios, and the forecasting exercise can quickly become a complicated tangle of spreadsheets, conditional formulas and various data sets. It’s easy to see how advisors and businesses can get overwhelmed.

With Forecasting in Fathom, you can easily spin up options and scenarios to gain critical insights into your business plans, and how they impact your financials. As part of that, we recently held a series of webinars for accountants (and business owners, you can find that here) explaining in detail how to get started with forecasting and showcasing some of the powerful features it has to offer.

Session 1: The Forecasting Basics

What you'll learn:
Getting started with Fathom's forecasting, using custom setup, u
sing budget, introducing the main grid including Quick Metrics.

 

Session 2: Microforecasts and Business Roadmap

What you'll learn:
Understanding the function of Microforecasts, how to build them, viewing them in the main grid, viewing them in the Business Roadmap, assessing your client's options in the Business Roadmap.

Session 3: Explore Scenarios

What you'll learn:
We cover why you would use scenarios and how to building them – configurations, building a scenario for Microforecasting, toggling between scenarios, fine tuning your scenario.

Session 4: Report and Monitor

What you'll learn:
Adding assumptions, balance sheet layer detail, predefined forecast reports, custom reporting, forecast charts and tables and reporting assumptions. 

 
 

Session 5: Tax settings

What you'll learn:
Consumption taxes, withholding taxes, tax expenses, viewing tax impacts - P&L, viewing tax impacts - Balance Sheet. 

And remember, Forecasting is included as standard in your monthly Fathom subscription. And if you're not yet a Fathom user, what are you waiting for? Start your free 14-day trial today.