Introduction to Forecasting in Fathom for businesses

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 businesses plan for the future. According to our user research, it takes around nine hours to build out a full three-way cash flow forecast for a business, that's if you even know how to build one.

Not only is that incredibly time-consuming, but any static forecast will be sliding out of date just four or five months later.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 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 business owners (and accountants, 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: Getting started with Forecasting

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

Session 2: Microforecasts and the 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 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:
VAT, payroll taxes, corporation tax, seeing the tax impact in your P&L, finding tax pay. 

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.