Are you ready to dive into Fathom and QuickBooks Online Advanced?  If you are like me, I like to learn as much as possible on something new.  Unfortunately for Fathom, there is very little content or how to’s.  

If you are brand new to Fathom or are just discovering it because you took on your first QuickBooks Online Advanced client, Fathom is a reporting and financial analysis tool, which helps you to assess your client’s business performance, monitor trends and identify areas of improvement and profitability.  You guessed it, this is our tool for analyzing the books and using our advisory skills to help our mid-market clients grow.

ProAdvisor tip:  You can also use this on any QuickBooks Online client by choosing Fathom as an add on app.  

For those of you who just discovered Fathom via QuickBooks Advanced, follow the steps below to set up your Fathom account.   Do this right away so that you can invite the client onto your Fathom account.  Trust me, you will be glad you took this initiative and the steps to secure this powerful tool under your account.  

Let’s push some buttons and see what shakes out?  Ready for the deep dive into Fathom?  Here we go!

Opt in to the newest version

Fathom 2.0

Some of you who may have had Fathom for years or even just a few weeks, may still be in the older version.  You have to take the steps to “opt” in.  How do you do that? It is easy.  Log into your QuickBooks Advanced program.  Click Reports, Smart Reporting Powered by Fathom, Click the icon to the right.  That will open Fathom.  

Turning on Fathom 2.0 is simple.  Go to settings, Organisation Settings, you just toggle to 2.0 under report settings.  Using Fathom 2.0,  will give you the capability to drag and drop and a few more other new features that can been seen here.  

Set up your Fathom Account for your Accounting Firm

It is a very simple set up of your accounting firm.  Enter the company name, address, phone number, URL, logo.  If you want the disclaimers on reports, you can select to add them here.   I had to resize my logo in order to white label Fathom. 

Playing in the Playground of Fathom Templates

The easiest place to get started is with the pre-canned templates within Fathom.  By selecting the firm you want to create reports for, then once on the client dashboard, select reporting.  This will bring up the templated reports. You can create and play around in as many drafts as you like.  Once you have the reports you like, you can publish them.  These reports are pretty much already setup for you.  The hard work is done. This is a great place to get started getting your feet wet in Fathom (pardon the pun!) Watch the video below for how I create these reports and how you can change the data to add the charts and graphs.  Fathom 2.0 has a sweet drag and drop feature. You can rearrange the blocks to whatever order you like.  You can change the orientation of the reports very simply.