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Most of the features in this article are specific to Ways to tier reporting
Tiered reporting enables accountants in practice to match the reporting output they provide for their clients to their clients’ needs or service-level. With tiers, you can ensure the value of your time and effort in reporting is recognised.
Report services can be tiered according to several factors, including:
Report Length
While the number of pages in a report is easy to measure, it does not always equate to the amount of effort put into creating a report or the usefulness of a report. Therefore, accurately gauging the service-offering by report length can be difficult.
💡Smart Tip: Fathom has several pre-defined report templates of various lengths you can use as inspiration or to directly create reports for your clients.
Customisation
Tailoring a report to a client enables you to make it more relevant to their business and situation. Including custom metrics, like non-financial KPIs, in reports can provide clients with leading or lagging indicators of financial performance and tie financial performance to metrics they’re more familiar with.
Example: A report for a marketing firm can include metrics like the number of projects, Actual vs Estimated Cost per project, and Actual vs Estimated Time per project.
Gathering additional data for custom KPIs often takes time, so the reporting or service-tier may reflect this.
💡Smart Tip: Some Fathom customers include a specific number of custom KPIs in each reporting tier because of the additional time it takes to verify and follow-up on the data, especially non-financial data.
So, their lower-level reporting tiers may only include 5-10 custom KPIs and higher reporting tiers may include more. If a client needs more custom KPIs, they need a higher service-offering and/or reporting-tier.
Additional services in the report
In Fathom, you can create forecasts, consolidated groups, and benchmark groups, which you can also incorporate into your reports.
If your client has divisions (e.g. tracking categories, classes, locations, etc.), then you can import those divisions into Fathom for divisional reporting.
For more information about reporting on any of the above, please see the specific article:
💡Smart Tip: If you’re interested in forecasting for your clients, but don’t know how to get started, please see our ‘Ready, Set, Go Forecasting’ series. Ben Cooper, MBA, shares his process for creating forecasts for clients in Fathom.
Cadence
Depending on your client’s goals or business life stage, they may need reports more or less often. Fathom enables you to create monthly, quarterly, or yearly reports.
Fathom Pro companies sourced from cloud accounting systems (i.e. Xero, QuickBooks Online, MYOB AccountRight Live, and Sage Business Cloud) have an additional option to import and report on month-to-date data.
Delivery
You can also base report tiers on commentary included and how reports are delivered.
In Fathom Pro reports, you can add tailored commentary throughout the report. Some of our customers send their clients additional collateral based on their service-tier.
For example, they may send some clients a PDF of their report and a short video walking through the key points. Or they could send them a PDF of their report and walk them through it during a regular meeting.
Fathom enables you to have an unlimited number of users. So, you can invite your clients into Fathom and tailor their permissions so they can only see published reports for their company.
If you’ve invited your clients in, you can send them an email when you publish their report. The email will inform them that the report is ready and prompt them to log into Fathom to view it. If you've enabled comments in a report, your client can ask questions, and you can respond in the online report.
You also have the option to download a PDF version of a report to send to clients.
How to tier reporting in Fathom
In Fathom, you can create a custom report template for each reporting tier. You can spend time creating your custom template, then quickly use it to create new reports each period.
To ensure you don’t miss any deadlines, you can schedule draft reports to be created from custom templates each month, quarter, or year. Fathom will email you when the draft report has been created so you can review it before publishing the report for your client.
To create a custom template:
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💡Smart Tip: If you already have an existing Fathom Pro report you like to use, you can turn it into a custom template.
📝 Note: If you are using custom KPIs in a report template, the custom KPIs will need to be added to the KPI Library. Learn more about this process from our ‘Getting clients set up efficiently’ article.
Use custom templates across clients
Depending on which process works better for your firm, you could share the custom templates or copy them to other companies in your Fathom organisation. Each option has strengths and weaknesses.
When you share a template, every company or client the template is shared with always uses the same report template. This is ideal for always ensuring everyone is using a standardised report. Because any time the template is edited, that change impacts the template for all companies it’s been shared with.
Example: You create a reporting template for your quarterly clients and share it with all the clients in your Fathom organisation. Every quarter, your team creates reports for their clients from this template.
After a couple of quarters, you decide to add an additional chart to the template based on client feedback. Because the template is shared, any new report created from the shared template includes the additional chart.
When you copy a template, the copy can be modified or changed for a particular client without impacting the original template. This is ideal if you want a general standardisation of your reports and flexibility when tailoring reports to specific clients. Because any time a copy of a template is changed, only that copy is impacted.
Example: Your firm has elements they include in every report for their monthly clients. You copy this monthly report template to your client. In the copy, you add charts and tables that your client has specifically requested for their monthly reporting. Each month, you can create a new monthly report for your client from their template.
Learn more about how to copy or share report templates from our ‘Templates’ article.
Example reporting tiers
At the bottom of this article, you can download sample reports for four report tiers. You may choose to have a different number of report tiers or include different elements in your report tiers based on your clients and their needs.
For easy comparison, every sample report is for the same marketing company.
First Tier
The first report tier is a Summary Report. For clients who may not be ready for or benefit from additional advisory services, you can import them into Fathom on a Portfolio plan.
The Portfolio plan enables you to view Portfolio clients on the Insights Dashboard and provide them with Summary Reports, without paying for Fathom’s full suite of features. Summary Reports are not as customisable as Pro reports but are a great first report tier option.
💡Smart Tip: Learn more about how to effectively use the plans for your accounting firm from our ‘How to choose your plan’ article.
💡Smart Tip: You could or could not include summary reports in as part of your clients’ fees as they could be an additional bonus of working with your firm. Summary reports are also a great way to reach out to non-advisory clients about advisory services.
Second Tier
The second tier is a Pro report in Fathom. It includes financial statements that compare performance to prior periods or the budget and display information down to the account level. Additional charts and tables available in Fathom Pro reports are included in this sample report and can be tailored to a client’s business.
Third Tier
The third report tier displays charts and tables for tracking custom KPI performance, including non-financial KPIs.
💡Smart Tip: Often non-financial data is needed to create custom KPIs for clients, so it’s good to keep this in mind when designing reporting tiers.
Fourth Tier
In addition to the data in the previous reporting tiers, the fourth report tier goes over the company’s forecast and projected performance.
Learn more