Name: What Your Clients Are Asking in 2026 — And How to Answer Them
Uploaded: 2026-04-23T19:31:02.358Z
Duration: 58 min 52 s
Description: What Your Clients Are Asking in 2026 — And How to Answer Them

Transcript for "What Your Clients Are Asking in 2026 — And How to Answer Them": Alright. Hello, everyone, and welcome to what your clients are asking in 2026 and how to answer them with QuickBooks and Fathom. Thank you so much for taking the time to join us today. My name is Heather Rutherford, and I am the senior partner marketing manager here at Intuit, and And I'm gonna be your host today. Before we get started, I'm just gonna go over a few quick housekeeping notes to make sure you get the most out of today's session. First and foremost, we want the session to be interactive. On the right side of your screen, you're gonna see three tabs, chat, docs, and q and a. If you go to the chat tab now, we'd love for you to say hello and let us know where you're joining from. I'm actually joining from Northern Idaho, Coeur D'Alene to be specific, and Roman is joining from Boulder. So feel free to engage in the conversation throughout this entire session. Share your experiences via chat through the session. We want we wanna be talking with all of you. There will also be a live q and a session at the end. You don't have to wait until then. Just simply use q the q and a tab and submit your questions there to have them answered live in that session. Also, if you see a question from another attendee that you're interested in having answered, you can upvote it, and it'll push it up to the top for us to make sure that we answer that. You can take a look at the docs tab to access today's slide deck and some extra resources related to what will be covered today. There'll also be a an email going out tomorrow to you all with all of all of this information. So you'll get that as well in your email inbox. And finally, at the top of your screen, you'll see a start your free trial button. You can click this at any time during the presentation without leaving the session. As a special thank you for attending today, Fathom is offering attendees 30% off for three months. So just click that button to also claim this discount. Alright. Before we dive in, I wanna tell you, where today's session actually comes from because it's not something we put together in a boardroom. Earlier this year, Fathom surveyed 260 plus finance professionals and accountants across North America, CFOs, controllers, fractional advisors, QuickBooks accounting firm partners, and asked them one question. What are the questions your clients, your boards, and your CEOs are putting in front of you right now? The results were pretty striking. Nearly half, 47%, said the number one theme coming up in their conversations right now is cash. Cash flow, cash runway, cash forecasting. And for the 31%, said profitability and margins are front and center. Not just are we making money, but where exactly is it going and why? And when asked whether Fathom had helped them answer those questions this quarter, 74% said yes. So today's session is to built entirely around that data. We've taken the most common questions from that survey, and we're going to answer every single one of them live using Fathom plus QuickBooks. To do that, I'm joined by Roman Filar. Roman is a CPA and the founder of Full Send, where he helps grow stage businesses with accounting, automation, and AI driven finance strategy. He uses the Fathom and QuickBooks integration every day with real clients to answer exactly these kinds of questions, building scenario forecast and board ready reports that answer the questions stakeholders are actually asking right now, like cash runway, hiring plans, and profitability and pressure. So let's get into it. Roman, you work with clients on this every day. Do those numbers ring true to you? Is that what you're seeing on the ground? Hey, Heather. Thanks. Thanks so much for having me. You know, it it does a lot of our clients. So we work in the, I would say early stage about 80% of our clients are capital backed, whether it's venture capital, private equity or family office. And so we're interfacing with boards. We're interfacing with capital providers, backers all the time. And cash is absolutely one of those things that not only, you know, mainstream businesses are paying attention to, but investors are looking at on a regular basis. And so what we're trying to do is give our clients confidence on how do you manage your cash, how do you think about it, what does runway look like if you're actually burning cash. So we're gonna walk through a few examples of how that happens, but 100% this is definitely relatable to what we see on a regular basis. Alright. So to launch this off, we're gonna do a quick poll. Just go over to this poll. Alright. The poll is, what's the question your clients or board are asking you most in 2026? So that poll is now open. It should be appearing on your screen. Just go ahead and, share your answers. Is it cash flow and runway, scenario, what if forecasting, profitability and margins, hiring decisions? What is the question your clients report are asking you most in 2026? And if none of these really resonate with you, feel free to put in the chat, you know, what is the questions that you're getting asked. I'm so curious as to what folks are gonna say, Heather, because it's, I think we get asked all these questions quite often, and we'll hit on a lot of these here in the demo here shortly. Alright. We still have some answers coming in, and I'll close this out in a second and share those answers, those responses. Alright. I'm gonna close it out and share. So it looks like, oh, sorry. I showed the wrong one. Here we go. 49% said cash flow and runway, 30% scenario what if forecasting, profitability margins is 19, and hiring decisions is 1%. Wow. I'm surprised that hiring decisions is so low. Yeah. Alright. Let's see here. So let's go into our next slide. 47% of North American respondents who cash flow runway is the number one question they're being asked right now. So, Roman, I'll put that to you. If a client asks you today, how long is our cash runway and what levers can we pull to extend it? Where do you start in Fathom? Yeah. So this this jives with exactly what we just saw in that poll. So when our clients are asking about cash flow, when they're asking about runway and to to frame the runway question right now, this is assuming that this is a cash burning business that likely there's an outside capital provider. They're leveraging the capital for this growth that they anticipate hitting profitability in the future. We see this most in the venture capital cycles. When the clients or boards or investors are asking about cash flow and runway, the way in which we're interacting with Fathom, is really just walking through their business plan, walking through their budget, walking through what is the next quarter, the next six months, the next twelve months look like for the business so that we can start to take all of those decisions that are being made, those micro forecasts, and layer them into a forecast where we can say, hey. How does this actually impact cash? Now I will say this is a different exercise than a thirteen week cash flow forecast looking at cash on a weekly basis. So the the way in which we plan and fathom is gonna be a little bit longer, timelines, longer cycles than on that week to week basis. As a client nears, you know, maybe three months, a couple months out of really running out of cash, that's when we wanna get a little bit more granular. But the vast majority of our clients aren't that, in dire straits from a cash basis. And so looking at a six month window, looking at a twelve month window is really helpful. And I would say by far and large, the two categories that are most impacted when we're looking at cash, one is hiring and two is gonna be sales and marketing spend. So it's how how quickly can we hire people or how many people can we hire in order to, meet our goals, meet our product, development, goals for the quarter of the year, and then how quickly can we spend on advertising or spend on marketing in order to generate future revenue. So, like, those are the two categories we're looking at from a cash perspective. And, yeah, we we play with levers and fathom all the time to to drill down on that. And I I can walk through this scenario too, if this is the right time to, share my screen on that, Heather. Absolutely. We'd love for you to share your screen. Cool. Alright. Let me hop in directly into Fathom and show you how we're looking at cash. Okay. So there's a screen. So if you happen to catch my last, webinar with Fathom on the expert series, I I use a demo account called Monsters, Inc. Because I got three little kids at home that love Monsters Inc. And so we're in the Monsters Inc, technology company or SaaS company as you might see, by the chart of accounts here on the left hand side. So if you're unfamiliar with Fathom, just a really quick overview. Everything you see in the left here that's that's grayed out, margin earlier, this is live data that's coming in through QuickBooks. So all of our clients are connected directly into Fathom through a QuickBooks integration. So as soon as the month is closed, we will update this rolling month to that most recent month end of close. Now we've already closed the books for March, and so March is the most recent and updated information. When I'm thinking about cash, there are a few areas that I'm looking at. One, when I'm building out a forecast in Fathom, it will always drill down to the cash balance at the end of of that period. So if you're looking down here right now, the the business is looking really healthy. Hey. We got $18,000,000 of cash on hand. This is great. Now we're hitting a a net loss about 400 k per month, and we can see in May, there is something impacting, the financials that is driving about a $9,000,000, net net loss for the period. So there's something in drivers or something in in the micro forecast that's impacting that. So the first place I'm looking is down here on the cash on hand figure, and then I'm also scrolling over to see when that, cash runway date is. So as of now, you can see up here on the right hand top right hand side, we are on the main forecast. We're not in any scenarios yet. In the main forecast and I'm working with clients to develop, like, what is our base case forecast? Because based on that, we wanna understand when the cash is going to run out. And I could tell my client with a degree of confidence, with directional accuracy that around February 2027 is when that date is based on what we see in the road map. In the road map, we've got a variety of hires that are coming in. We've got, oh, we've got World Cup ads that looks like a massive cash outflow in May. We'll hit on that here in a moment when we're looking at at the scenarios. But when we're drilling down to cash, I'm looking at this, I'm looking at the the road map, and then I'm also gonna be looking at the scenarios. How are the scenarios impacting the the forecast? If the client wants to understand, hey. Real quick. I just wanna see, based on the revenue forecasted for that World Cup promo that we're doing, what does that look like to my cash? I can pretty quickly come here and see, okay, there's actually a revenue lift. Hey. We don't actually run out of cash because those World Cup ads really bolster our revenue, the and cash to the bottom line. So I can really quickly just look here and and see that impact to cash. Now in a moment here, I'll toggle over to the reporting, to show you in a reporting scenario, reporting environment, and Fathom, how do we actually display what those different scenarios look like. But for now, I'll pause here on the cash side of things, and then happy to answer any questions, that come through the chat and or save some of those to the end. Well, Heather, you're still on mute. Sorry about that. Is your forecast, P and L and Fathom, cash basis, or accrual, or does it matter from Stephanie Tressler? Yeah. Stephanie, that's a really good question. So all all the books that we manage for our clients are gonna be on an accrual basis. Now in a pure cash basis environment, you're gonna see a higher degree of accuracy in a Fathom forecast. However, there are toggles that you can use. I can actually, show you an example here. I'm gonna pull my screen up real quick just to show you, Stephanie, what that looks like on my end. So from an accrual basis, in Fathom, the way that we we work with our clients, let's say subscription revenue, we know that some of these contracts are gonna land in deferred revenue. Some of them are annual contracts paid upfront. Some of them are quarterly. Some of them are paid month to month. What you do in that scenario is instead of recognizing this as cash dropping straight to the bottom line and impacting this number, you would actually manipulate the collection period for this particular revenue line item. In this instance, we're saying, hey. This revenue is actually collected over twelve months. So any net new revenue that falls into that this category is impacting cash in this schedule that we set here. That could be collected over three months. That could be collected 100% upfront. And I attribute this to the chart of accounts level, from a revenue perspective and cash perspective and Fathom. The same thing goes for payables and the expenses that roll through the balance sheet in ARAP. You can set up different payment cycles from that. Same thing with different journals. You can you can manipulate in some ways and utilize Fathom to mirror how your, your client is behaving on a accrual basis. It definitely requires a little bit of massaging, but once you have it set up, it usually operates pretty well and in tandem with what you'd expect from, an accrual basis forecast. Here's a question from Michelle. Is it possible to forecast weekly? We have several clients who need this. Yeah. Michelle, that that's also a good question. So in Fathom today, there's not the weekly view. And and that's what I was kind of alluding to earlier when when our clients are running down on their runway and, like, they are really running tight on cash, really lean on cash, that's when, quite honestly, that that's a scope opportunity for me as a firm owner and as an advisor to my clients. If my clients need that weekly basis, I'm making sure that I'm increasing my scope with them to work with them much more closely and to to operate typically connected Google Sheet model that is updated very, very frequently and I'm working through that with my client. But in Fathom, I'm looking at this at a monthly view, like one or two layers up from, from the weekly presentation. And then a question from Pamela, and then we'll move forward. Please explain the residual drawdown. Yeah. So the residual drawdown in Fathom, is attributed to the accounts receivable, and this is effectively saying, what is our days sales outstanding? How many days do we have aged receivables? What's the typical collection cycle look like? And so residual drawdown would effectively act as a calculation, like a systematized calculation of saying, hey. We've got a million dollars, sitting in accounts receivable. We know when that that revenue was generated based on the actuals that are being piped into Fathom, and we're gonna draw it down based on that thirty day or sixty day or ninety day day sales outstanding. It's just one of those settings in in Fathom that you can manipulate to better mirror your client's behavior for more accurate forecasting in the future. Alright. And with that, I think we should go into our next poll. So next poll, have you used Fathom scenario forecasting or micro forecast to answer a client question? I'm putting that poll up now. It should be on your screen. So answer options are yes. I use them regularly. I've tried them once or twice. Not yet. That's why I'm here. And I didn't know Fathom could do that. This is an interesting question, Heather, because I've talked to a number of Fathom users at conferences and they only use Fathom for the reporting tool, which is great. However, I think the some of the best benefit that we get from Fathom is in the forecasting, the the scenario analysis, the micro forecast. And one of my favorite ways that I engage with that, from a scenario perspective is all set up like, you know, Sally's playground. If my client is Sally, I'm like, hey, Sally. I want you in this tool. I want you to understand how it works because I'm building it on your behalf. And I'll set up Sally's playground and Sally can go in and manipulate the drivers and the micro forecast and it doesn't mess with my, like, primary or main forecast at all. It's a really cool way to help teach your, your clients about that. It's okay, Cameron. I can't You know, I was gonna say that I saw that comment. I'm pretty intimidated by the forecasting feature. I saw that too. Alright. Let's share not it's not that intimidating. It's it's very user friendly and. I'll I'll walk through kind of these two elements here in a moment. K. So we've got 6.8%. Yes. I use them regularly. 30%, I tried them once or twice. 53%, not yet. That's why I'm here. And at 9.7%, I didn't know Fathom could do that. Okay. That's great. sounds like something we should talk about a little bit more. Yeah. Let's talk about it. Okay. So I'm gonna I'm gonna just jump right back into Fathom because about 50% of you well, I guess, 60%, including those that didn't know that Fathom had forecasting, 50% said they don't use the tool. So let's jump into the tool, and I'll show you, maybe the ease in which you can do this for some of your clients. Okay. So I mentioned I mentioned earlier, when I don't see anything up here in this top right hand side under scenarios, I know I'm on this main forecast. In Fathom, you have the ability to create, I think, an unlimited amount of scenarios, not that you'd need them all. I don't know what the limit is on number of scenarios, but I haven't hit that yet. So what happens when you create a scenario is you take this main forecast. Let me go back to the p and l. You take this main forecast that ideally you've worked with your client to create, and you can create a scenario as easily as this. Let's say demo scenario, and you would create the scenario based on everything that's flowing into the main forecast. And from there, if you have any micro forecasts, you can actually toggle those on or off based on what you wanna see in this new scenario. So I didn't have a fundraise toggled on in the main forecast. I'm actually gonna toggle that on for this demo. And as soon as I click on create scenario, now you can see I've got a completely new demo scenario that is active here. And what's cool about this so I use drivers quite a bit for calculations that flow into the forecast. And feel free to ask questions as I'm going here. But, if I'm building out a sales funnel for a client, this is one example of how I might do that. I might say, hey. Based on the number of salespeople you have, how many leads do we expect them to generate? How many, what's the conversion percentage we anticipate them to apply to a qualified lead? How many closed leads does that move into? What's the average contract value? Thus, what is the estimated revenue growth based on number of account executives? So in this new scenario that I just created, I can go into these drivers and say, well, what if I hire five account executives in April? Maybe I hire five in June. Okay. Well and maybe these are contract account executives, and you can see exactly what the change is down here on, on the revenue growth. So what's cool is all of these changes will flow through to the profit and loss here, and they will update the subscription revenue based on how I've calculated that. But when I go back to main scenario, you'll see all these numbers change. When I go back to drivers, it's right back where it was because any modifications that I made to this demo scenario, five and five, did not impact the main forecast. So really just the scenario is a way for you to, like, save an existing forecast, create something new so you can quickly show a client, some changes that they might have to their future plans. Now let me switch over to micro forecast for a moment because I think micro forecasts are are one of those tools that makes it super easy for clients to understand the impact of their potential business decisions. You can access micro forecast here on the left hand side by just clicking here and looking at them or by going into the business roadmap. I think the business road map and the micro forecasts are super easy to use particularly for hiring. And in this scenario, for a tech company that we're working with, they're often taking on capital, outside capital, in order to hire people. So in this case, they wanna hire, you know, seven engineers, four engineers, and three senior. They wanna invest in customer success. And so the way that these are structured is they're structured based on your chart of accounts. Hey. What what is the payroll section, that this particular hire is gonna hit? Hey. This is gonna be DevOps and infrastructure payroll. It's going to be allocated to cost of goods sold versus perhaps an OPEX payroll account. What is the base salary gonna be, and how is that going to impact this account on a monthly basis? In this cat in this case, this is a $120,000 base salary. And I will say for those of you that are like, wait. Where's the benefits and taxes? I in a normal scenario, I would also have a benefit outgoing account, benefits for that team member. I would also have taxes and then any other ancillary benefits that may need to be attributed here because we want the fully burdened cost of the employee here. Now once I have maybe one hire developed here, I can go ahead and duplicate that into a second hire. And what's cool about that is that in any of these scenarios, anytime I look at this hiring road map, let's say the client is like, you know what? I don't think we're gonna hire engineer three and four, so let's go ahead and, pause on those. I can just toggle these off, and they're gone. Now they're still there. They're just inactive in this scenario, and the attributed cash to that hire, you can see on this bottom, cash on hand view, that disappears. That goes away. The immediate cash impact is known based on the change in that decision. And the same goes for if you were to say, you know what? Engineer one, we actually wanna accelerate that higher. Instead of July, we wanna hire in May. You just drag and drop it. You drag it over to May, and immediately you see that cash impact. So as you go back to your forecast and your p and l, those those micro forecast, the decisions that you're making there are reflected here. So you know how I moved engineer one from July up to May? Well, now their salary is being reflected in May automatically on that p and l. It's one of those kind of wow moments that you have whenever you, are working alongside of a client. Maybe you have this up live on a meeting and you're making these changes. They're like, man, that that was fast. That was awesome. And you drive value immediately through the tools that you're partnering with to help bring your clients more visibility. I will pause there because I believe a bunch of questions are coming in. So I'm gonna stop sharing, and then we can hit on a few questions and I can reshare if needed. Perfect. Yes. We do have a lot of questions coming in. Let's start with how do you decide when to use a micro for micro forecast versus a full scenario model? Yeah. It's a it's a good question. So, I would be thinking about that through the lens of, is this a one time thing? Is, like, is this a one time event that's happening, or is this something that's gonna have kind of a ripple effect of decisions? And so what I mean by that is, like, in the micro forecast, I have World Cup ads. $10,000,000 is being spent for advertising for the World Cup. That that's a one time thing that is going to either result in $10,000,000 being spent or not, and I would like to be able to toggle that on or off. Now that's an example of how I'd use micro forecast, but in a scenario, I also use that same micro forecast to show how that could actually behave, so the ripple effect. So in my up scenario actually, well, I won't show that right now. But in my up scenario, I would actually attribute a higher revenue dry, being driven from that ad spend. And then in a down scenario, I would actually say, hey. No revenue is driven from this ad spend. It totally flopped, to be able to plan those differently. So that's kinda how I think about the micro forecast versus scenarios. Can you set up scenarios for different classes? Oh, for different classes. That's a good question. So, in Fathom today, you can, you would effectively be operating under a consolidated environment where your classes operate, like, really as their own entities within Fathom. So they'd roll up to the kinda consolidated view, but you would just be working with the specific class detail that's piped in from QuickBooks, in its own environment in Fathom. That's like a level three or level four series, but yes, it is possible. How do you freeze or save original data so it doesn't change? Or if you allow a client to do what ifs, they don't change what you've done so far. Yeah. Yeah. It's a good question. Let me let me pop my screen up real quick so you can see that. So there are a few ways to to do this. The the easiest way is just up in this right hand side. You can click on save, and this is available in any screen. So if I go if I go over to micro forecast or scenarios or road map, alright. Maybe it's just forecast. When I click on save, I can either save this forecast as a budget, which I would recommend doing once, maybe twice a year if you're going through an a budget update cycle, or you can create a forecast snapshot. And that prevents any changes from being made to the forecast that you're kind of locking at at this point in time. And when you create a new forecast snapshot, you you choose which scenario you want, what date you want the actuals to roll from, what the period range looks like. Then once you create that snapshot, you can actually report against that snapshot in your client reporting too. So you can say, hey, based on the forecast we set up in January, we just closed March and here was the variance between actuals and March compared to the forecast snapshot that we saved in January. It's a really helpful feature that I think recently came out about maybe six months ago. This question came up from Jennifer. I can see how to add a new hire salary, but how do I add their increased revenue if they hit targets? Yeah. That Jennifer, that that's a good question. And I suspect you're talking about, hiring sales folks. So that account executive hire, which is what I was, showing in the drivers, I would typically attribute the the cost portion to well, at least the the salary and benefits cost portion in a micro forecast to the wages account. But then I would actually build a separate driver for the commissions and the expected revenue because I would expect the commissions and revenue to, move in tandem. And so I would say in the drivers, how many salespeople we have or what's this the commission structure for any given salesperson, what's the expected revenue being driven by them, and then what's the commission, and then attribute those to the correct accounts on the p and l within Fathom. So that's probably, like, a level two, level three thing, but, like, definitely something you can do and you need to pay attention to because you don't want the micro forecast of hiring to get out of sync with the revenue driving actions from the team if it is based on number of salespeople. Rich actually put a comment in. Can you show multiple revenue lines products? I'm not sure if you can show that right now, but it'd be great if you could. Yeah. It's I mean, it's an interesting question. Like, it depends, I I guess, on how the revenue lines are are stood up. Like, in the current, example that I have, we have several revenue lines. You can see just flowing through the chart of accounts. So piped in from QuickBooks, we've got subscription revenue that operates differently than the usage based revenue, that operates differently than the implementation revenue. And so, like, these are different, like, unique revenue streams, that have unique cost goods or could have unique cost of goods sold attached to them. So, yes, you can absolutely work with different revenue streams. And what I would likely do is create different categories of drivers that are attributed to each revenue stream based on the unit economics of how it it flows into the p and l. So you can absolutely do that. Products, definitely, when they're dependent upon inventory and balance sheet items gets a little bit trickier. Again, level three, level four, but it but it is doable. Dan had a question towards the beginning and when we started this portion. So is there an as is there an assumptions audit report that shows how the scenarios differ? There there is. Yes. So you can download, you could download, I think, most of these views into Excel if you really need to bring it into Excel. But as part of that functionality, the part of the export functionality, you can export, you know, your full forecast p and l balance sheet and, attribute which scenario you want that to and then also export the assumptions that go alongside of that. Another thing that you can do too is in the the reporting section, if you are reporting on a forecast or a specific scenario, there is a part of that report that you can actually embed a table that shows the drivers and assumptions that are going into the forecast. And so that can be helpful if your clients want to say, okay. Well, you know, how many account executives do we have flowing into this assumption that's resulting in this revenue number? So if your clients like that level of detail, then you can absolutely add a table in the reporting section and fathom, to show those assumptions. Great. Let's answer two more quick questions, and we'll move forward. Can we remove a salary employee on business road map? Oh, yeah, we can. So here here's a few things to think about. Alright. Let me show my screen again. I'm just gonna pop in and out of this demo. So when we're looking at the business road map, one thing you you can you should be cognizant of is that these are typically future planned hires. So this is looking out to the future. Well, in the month of March, we've hired engineer two, senior engineer one, two, and three. So those should be automatically, well, accounted for in the actuals for March wages. These are no longer future facing employees. If you no longer want to hire somebody that is future facing, you could just toggle it off. There there are a few ways that you could plan for scenario in which there was, you know, a reduction in workforce, and that could really just be as simple as as going into this this constant value here and saying, actually, we're going to reduce this higher, or reduce. We're gonna remove this basically wage from this role, and now it turns into a negative number and actually hits the future numbers, by that amount specifically. The other way that you could do that is by going into, going back into forecast p and l. Let me go to wages. And within wages, what you'll see is that you've got an established baseline, and that baseline is gonna be made up of your your past baseline plus your existing, forecasted hires. So you can see that 82,000 there. You can also adjust this future baseline as well. So let's say, you know, in the month of May, you can see that first toggle of how that workforce reduction could look here on this minus 10,000. Hey. We believe this engineer one is no longer gonna be with the team, or you could go ahead and adjust this baseline for maybe an employee that wasn't in this original micro forecast by simply going to, this, baseline here, and you would actually just adjust that baseline by that $10,000 and it would adjust everything going forward. I did I adjusted the existing rule that's why I impacted a previous period. If you wanted to create a new rule to have that 72 just attributed to May, then I would have created a completely new rule. So, hopefully, that answers that question. Yes. It does. The last question I was gonna ask before moving forward is just how many accounts can be added to a micro sorry. How many accounts can be added to a micro forecast? That is a good question for Fathom. I have not reached the limit of the number of of situations or hiring or anything. I've I've never reached any limits. I don't know. It could be unlimited for all I know. But I think you'll be alright. Nice. Alright. So let's move move forward in the presentation. 11% of respondents specifically mentioned hiring and staffing decisions as a top question. Things like, can I afford to hire, or what does adding a new product line do to our cash? Roman, how would you handle that kind of what if question in Fathom? Yeah. I mean, we we've walked through a couple examples on how to how to handle that, through those scenarios and through the micro forecasts. Now, so so that that is how I handle them. But what I think is important in this question is like, how are you going about the delivery of answering these types of questions to your clients? Like, it's one thing to set up a scope with your clients to help them with forecasting, to help them with headcount planning, to help them with cash planning. It's another thing to to walk through this exercise with them so they can help get a better understanding of their business. That's how I like to operate, and we we really work with our clients to answer these questions in two different ways. One, we tell them, hey. This is the tool that we really like to use for forecasting. This is the tool that we like to use for planning. Here's how it works. I just walked through a full demo with them of Fathom on a call and show them, here's the tool that we could equip you with. And what what I tell them is I say, hey. Path one is I'll set it up for you. I'll I'll architect how the system works. I'll take all assumptions and scenarios and micro forecasts and drivers that you equip me with, and I will embed everything into the tool. And after that, we are going to work in it together. I'm gonna give you full access to be able to make changes to this, and I'm gonna give you a couple Loom videos on here's how you can start to toggle things. So I I want to teach my clients how to fish and self serve in a lot of ways because this is a tool that that we are equipping our clients with to make those planning decisions like hiring. That said, you gotta be a little bit careful on getting clients in there if they're not fully comfortable with navigating the system, which leads to the second way that I work with clients on this who, you know, clients maybe don't wanna get in there. They don't want to go in and fool around with the drivers. They don't wanna mess with micro forecast. They don't wanna fool around with headcount planning. They want it more delivered to them and just to provide input on how it gets done. Well, that's a different engagement level. That's not just a project that's build one time. That's an ongoing advisory relationship where I'm working with the client on a regular cadence. Maybe that's monthly, maybe it's more frequently than monthly in, times where there's a lot of changes happening. And I'm taking all of their assumptions. I'm taking their new hires, and we're making changes to it on a monthly basis. And we're reviewing that that results on a monthly basis. And so that's gonna be a a completely different type of engagement than that one time project. I think you should be ready to have both conversations with clients, but it's it's an option. I've got clients on both sides of the fence, and I like both of them. And inevitably, the clients that want to self serve will introduce a level of complexity in their business that they'll need continued help for. So it's one of those things that for me, like, just utilizing this as a tool has been super helpful to help our clients plan, but I I do lean heavily on the scenarios and micro forecasts. Nice. We have quite a few questions still to answer, so we got plenty of time. We've looked at a couple of third party cash flow forecast vendors who connect nicely with QBO. Would prefer to avoid adding another cloud package to our suite if Fathom can handle some of those same features. So it's kind of a question and statement all in one, but how would you respond to that? Oh, I I don't know what the name like, who who asked that question, but, Michael, Campana? that I'm sorry. Michael? Michael. Yeah. Michael. Michael. Michael. That, that is so relatable. The cash flow forecasting is is a very personal exercise. It's a very detailed exercise that I've explored a dozen tools that are like, we've we use AI for cash flow forecasting. We use this proprietary model or it's automated, and I have yet to find anything that I love. I've yet to find anything that I'm like, man, this works for a great thirteen week cash flow forecast. The closest I've gotten is live data piped into a Google Sheet and and just setting up a framework that works for me and works for my client that could be updated on a regular basis. That's for weekly cash flow forecasting. But I understand the the desire not to be not to have too much tech sprawl or tool spread across multiple tools. And so from a Fathom perspective, if most of your clients are cool with getting a monthly view of cash and the changes of their decisions or the growth of their business and what the impact of cash is there, Fathom is a phenomenal tool for that. And that's where most of our clients live. They they look at their business on monthly rhythms. They look at their business on quarterly rhythms, and to see the cash change on that that, cadence is is frequent enough. And so Fathom's great tool for that. If you're looking for more granular, I have not found too many tools in that space quite yet. Gotcha. This came in from Pamela through the beginning. Hope you can cover the hierarchy of road map, micro forecast, and scenarios. Do they overlap? Are they separate? Or are they nested? Or what? Okay. So the hierarchy of scenarios, micro forecasts, and what was the last piece? The hierarchy of road map, micro forecast, and scenarios. Do they overlap? Okay. Are they separate? Or are they nested? Okay. Good good question. I'll share my screen here quickly just to show you. So I'm on business road map right now. All business road map is is just a consolidated view of the micro forecasts. So this is not, like, within a separate hierarchy within Fathom. It's really just taking these micro forecasts and showing them displaying them slightly differently. You can create micro forecasts within the business roadmap. You can also report the business roadmap in a report as its own, section or its own visual. Now from a scenario perspective, you will have micro forecasts living in each of your scenarios. So from a hierarchy perspective, you've got your main forecast with everything in it, then you have scenario, you know, up scenario or down scenario, and you could have the same, micro forecast living them or different micro forecasts. So to give you an example, right now, let's go to micro forecast. I'm gonna turn on all of these hires just so you can see the difference here. So right now, we are in the base scenario. You you can tell because there's nothing up here, and all of our microforecasts are turned on. Now I'm gonna toggle over to our down scenario. And in this scenario, let me unhide these. Okay. We also have all these on. So in scenario in the down scenario, let's say, hey. Revenue is not gonna be as good. I'm gonna toggle these off because I don't want that additional spend because revenue is dropping. Now those changes are tagged to this particular down scenario. So all of that flows into the forecast up here. And then if I go back to the main forecast and I go back to my road map, all of these same toggles are are back on because I never did edit those in the main forecast. So I I don't know that it's necessarily a hierarchy as these microforecasts can live in either scenario. It's just more of a function of, what is turned on and off within that scenario, if that makes sense. I will also say that the same thing goes for drivers. So in your forecast, I use micro forecasts and drivers, not necessarily interchangeably. I use them for different things. But any changes, like I showed earlier of the five account executives here what was that in? The down scenario or the up scenario? Yeah. Well, I made changes to this. You could see these toggling around as I change the scenario. And these drivers are also attributed or tagged into the, P and L independently. So I'm always working to start off of this base and then modifying anything here based on the client's requests. Perfect. Lisa asked, what is best practice for starting a new year forecast regarding micro forecast and scenarios? Do you delete them? Man, that's a good question. It depends. So for clients that opt into, you know, a biannual or annual planning cycle with us, like, hey. We need help for budgeting for the next year. Can you help us with that exercise? Yeah. Absolutely. In that scenario, I would typically start fresh. For the clients that we are engaged with in an advisory relationship on a monthly basis, we don't have to start fresh. We don't have to, like, do a big amount of deleting because there's just that, like, routine maintenance that's going on within the micro forecast, within the drivers. I was on with a client last week, and we did some cleanup to their drivers that just use some old assumptions based on how they generate revenue, then we cleared it out and created a new, new drivers for their revenue assumptions. And so it kinda depends on the relationship you have with your clients, but the more frequently that you have that type of advisory touch point with them, the the more frequently you're updating that and the less likely you'd have to, start fresh and delete everything. Gotcha. Have you found efficient and effective ways to forecast balance sheet driven organizations? Lots of borrowing and lending. Oh, that's a good question. Is that Michael again? No. That's Dan. Dan Plowden. Yeah. Dan, that's a good question. Like, a three way forecast. So in Fathom, it's always gonna display a three way forecast. So any changes that you make to the p and l are going to flow through to the balance sheet, through AR, through cash. Now if you're looking at, like, heavy lending scenarios, you can create a schedule and attribute, you know, an interest schedule, to to loans. You can attribute a depreciation schedule for a capitalized software or amortization schedule. There are definitely a lot of ways to be able to do that. The only place that I've really ran into a bit of trouble is in the manufacturing process when there's work in progress and there's, balance sheet movement between accounts only on the balance sheet that don't hit the p and l. Like, if an inventory item is a raw material moving into work in progress, moving into a finished good, like, that can get kind of tricky. In my experience, that's gonna be tricky across any software. It's just a complexity that drives the need for high quality accountants like you. So, hold on to that. That's great. I I focus more on the p and l forecasting on on the Fathom side, to be to be honest. Alright. Stephanie just put this question in. Since Fathom is connected to QBO, am I correct that you don't ever have to go back to correct anything, drivers, etcetera, just going forward? Yep. Great question. So that's right. That's right. Yeah. I I don't think think I've ever, gone into any historicals or had to make any changes historically to any numbers. It's just 100% the data that's coming in from QBO. Now, as you well know, there could be clients or team members or changes that occur in historical periods that may or may not be locked in QBO, and those changes will show up in Fathom in historical periods. So if there is a change in that income, if there's change to, a balance sheet account historically based on accounting entries that happen after the fact, those will update the numbers. And so that's where I think it's important to be able to maintain, like, a bit of an audit trail on were there any changes that were made several months ago, like in the year end close process. Maybe that happened in February or March when a change was made. Track those changes, make sure that, you're aware of how those changes flow through into the forward looking forecast, because it could absolutely materially impact what some forward looking assumptions look like. But you don't have to worry about the data not transferring over. That'll be automatic every time. This This is great. We're getting some upvotes now, so people wanna see these questions answered. How do you determine when to use drivers versus when to use the micro forecast? Cool. Boy, good question. Let me share share my screen here. Okay. So in well, actually, let me start with the micro forecast, just to show you mechanically how that works. And, actually, I'll I'll use the World Cup ad example. So if we're gonna, advertise for the World Cup in the month of May, this is really predicated solely based on activity in the chart of accounts. So I am making a change to I'm in the down scenario, but I'm making a change to a specific p and l line item that I I know this this micro forecast will impact. So World Cup ads is gonna impact my sales and marketing account. Same thing goes for any hires, this engineer, that's gonna impact the, DevOps and infrastructure payroll account. So these are very specific to, dollars moving in and out of specific accounts. For drivers, when I go back to drivers, I'm using drivers more as calculations. So for instance, this go to market campaign or this go to market, revenue driving activity is gonna be based on that that sales funnel conversion that I talked about that I'm really just calculating what this end number is. And if I wanna see what a change looks like to that based on hiring more account executives, I can see what that changes automatically based on how this is calculated, and then this flows through to the balance sheet. I can't create I guess I could create similar calculations in a micro forecast, but I find that this is a little bit more, visually it's an easier visual presentation of this data for me and for my clients to understand versus working it into a micro forecast just in the formula field. The same thing goes, I think in my up scenario here, I had a revenue attributed to this says Super Bowl ad is World Cup now because we're past the Super Bowl. But same thing goes here because I've got a calculation here that is attributed to a revenue line item. However, I wanted to attribute a change to it. Hey. We got revenue attribution to an expense flowing through the micro forecast that's actually decreasing 28% each month because of the ad efficacy, and I just I prefer seeing that in drivers. On on one hand, I think it's a little bit of a preference thing. On the other hand, it's just visually how do you wanna see that. The other way that I would use that is like, expense accounts that are a percentage of another account, you can easily, utilize and drivers more effectively the micro forecasts. So for example, for our cost of goods sold, our cloud hosting, we know is gonna be 9% of our revenue each month. And so when I go down to my cost of goods sold tech, my cloud host hosting formula is that percentage that I attributed in the drivers multiplied by my subscription revenue. And so that's gonna calculate the same each time. And if my unit economics change, my Cloud hosting gets cheaper, I can modify this down to a different percentage. Great. I'll pause. are these are more comments, but I kinda wanted to just kinda get your response to the comments, and they are questions. Yeah. But, in the comments, Pamela said, I like that I can exclude incomplete, unclosed periods from syncing into Fathom. It's a mess when you only have a live real time sync. She got a couple likes on that. And then this one, Mike Ford, be careful when new accounts are added in QBO. They'll get picked up in Fathom and impact your forecast. Just kinda wanted to get your thoughts on that, that comment. Oh, man. Yes. Solid point. Yeah. When new accounts we had this happen with with an, a client that wanted to break out their revenue a little bit differently. They went from basically, one revenue chart of account in QuickBooks into segmenting it based on type of revenue. And so whenever I was in Fathom the next round when we were reviewing it, I didn't know that that happened. When when I went to the forecast in Fathom, I saw these new accounts pop up, yet what we had are, architected for their revenue model was all still flowing into that one account. So we had some rework to do in order to split that revenue out into the appropriate accounts. But that could definitely be like a gotcha thing if you're, particularly if you're deprecating accounts, if you're no longer using certain accounts that did have, formulas or calculations tied to them in Fathom, it could it could be challenging. So definitely look out for that great point. Alright. This one had a upvote. Is there an undo function? Like, in that salary change example, could you just undo it? So that I love that question because I had the same question when I was going through this. You you can't control z it. However, the assumptions or or sorry, assumptions. The changes in Fathom do operate under a hierarchy of of, changes. So if I move this four to five, I can't I can't click on a control z, but you can see that I direct entry to five here. Actually, I wanna delete that. As soon as I delete it, it goes back to what I had. Actually, I think I updated direct entry. So let me say constant growing value. I'm gonna direct entry this at twelve. This change here, as soon as I go back, it's gonna go back to the constant growing value. Same thing goes for micro forecast. Let's look at engineer one. This is the one we fired. Whoops. Let's go ahead and say this is negative 20,000. Oh, I'm in the up scenario. Let me get out of that real quick. Sorry. I'm taking a little bit of time here. Engineer one, let's say that was a negative 20,000. I can still direct entry here. Oh, nothing went wrong. We're still doing fine. As soon as I delete that, it goes back to what it was. So you can undo by doing that, but that's the best way that I've found to handle that. Great. The next question is, how do you handle QuickBooks classes when forecasting the Fathom? I found we have to add each class as a client which gets expensive. Yep. That that's my understanding as well. Quite honestly, if if you were operating an environment with a client that does have multiple classes or locations or different consolidated files, My hope would be that you were, charging a premium for having to manage the books by class segmentation, and that additional cost would be absorbed pretty easily in in the rate uptick that you would be charging your client. But I'm with you. That's how we operate multiple classes in quick or in QuickBooks and in in Fathom. It's one of those things that, is a necessary evil, I suppose, but I'm okay with it because we feel good about our pricing structure given those environments. Alright. Is there any way to go around the class limit in, for example, revenue per client or profit per client? I see that we have a limit and have to use only top 10 or top five. Could you say that again? I'm not familiar with any limits. I don't know. It's from Arturo. It actually just came into the comments. Is there any way to go around the class limit in, for example, revenue per client or profit per client? I see that we have a limit and have to use only top 10 or top five. Oh, okay. I think that's in relation to the, reporting view. So, yes, in reporting, you have a limitation of, you know, top five vendors or top five, like, revenue drivers, clients, things like that. You know, Arturo, that's a good question. I'm I'm not entirely sure. I typically will go with just the top 10 vendors or top 10, you know, fill in the blank on what metric we're looking at. I'd be interested as to what additional value you would get, out of showing 20 of them. Like, does your client want to see 20 or or more than what's available? That would be really good feedback for Fathom to know from a presentation perspective, but I I'm not sure if there's a way to get around that. I'm sorry. Garnett asked, once a budget has been completed for next year, why is there no custom report available to produce a professional budget report? Produce a professional budget report. And and I'm guessing is that related to, reporting in Fathom? Because, Once a budget has been completed for next year, why is there no custom report. available to produce a professional budget report? Garnett, if you wanna type in the comments what exactly you're referring to, then we can answer that question. Yeah. Yeah. Because there's definitely there's definitely a way to, you know, present a a a locked budget and performance against the budget in in Fathom. You may want to look at the financials instead of a table or the visual presentation for that, locked budget in a, you know, more p and l based format. But, yeah, you could definitely show that in Fathom for sure. And then I'm just gonna do one more question because we need to kind of wrap things up. And for anyone who submitted questions and did get them answered live, we will follow-up with you directly after the webinar to make sure that those questions get answered. The last question, how simple is it to connect Fathom and QuickBooks for a new client? Yeah. It's an interesting, I mean, it's an interesting question because it it doesn't really consume too many brain cycles for me. Connecting QuickBooks and Fathom takes about three minutes and you're up and running. I had a client last week ask me if we could move forward with the forecasting exercise there on QuickBooks, and I went through the exercise in about three minutes, and I was up and running with their forecast in about ten, starting to get to work on some of the assumptions that they sent us. So it takes three minutes, you're up and running, and it's super easy to set up. Awesome. Alright. So we're gonna kinda close things out, and I'm going to launch a survey for you all. If you guys could just take a really quick quick minute, to just answer these five questions, it really helps us with evaluating what you wanna see, what you don't wanna see, what content we should offer you moving forward. So please just take, like I said, just a couple minutes and answer those questions real quick. Thank you all so much for taking the time out of your busy schedules to join us today. We hope you found this session valuable and that we will be sending you an email tomorrow with recording, the deck, links to resources. We'll connect you with Roman, if you wanna reach out to him on LinkedIn. So, feel free to share that information with your colleagues or clients. And, just like I said before we sign off, I'd like you guys to just answer that survey for us. And then, Roman, any final thoughts you wanna share before we close this session out while people are responding to that survey? Boy, you know, Fathom's one of those tools that we've been using for a number of years now and has provided a a tremendous amount of value to us and our clients. It's so cool to see a bunch of familiar names in the chat here. Please answer the survey. That's, a helpful indicator to to me whether you you rate me positively or roast me. It's a good indicator to the rest of the team on, you know, how how we continue to provide value like this and get into more detail on problems that you face or questions you may have. And then one one thing to to highlight, Adam Adam Turco in the chat actually said, hey. Use the QBO budget setup to load the budget in QuickBooks. That actually ports over to Fathom really, really well as an actual versus budget reporting tool. So, like, kudos to that. Thank you, Adam, and everybody else who made comments today. Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm at Roman Bilar, CPA. Happy to answer any one off questions you may have there, and, hope everybody has a good one. Yep. And please click on that start your free trial button at the very top of your screen. Like I said, if you wanna take advantage of that 30% off Fathom for three months. Thanks again, Roman, and to all our attendees for your engagement insightful questions. I hope you guys all have a wonderful rest of your day, and, please give us your honest feedback in that survey. Thank you so much. Bye.