Fathom Xero consolidation: an alternative for multi-entity groups

Fathom is the better choice if you need intercompany eliminations, budgets and forecasting alongside your group reporting, or one tool across many companies and several ledgers. APBuddy Reporting is narrower: consolidated reporting for a group running on Xero, with controls that check whether each entity’s ledger actually closed, and analysis that cites its sources. Both are management reporting tools rather than statutory consolidation software — Fathom says so about itself, and the same is true of us.

Everything said here about Fathom comes from Fathom’s own website and help centre, checked on 12 October 2026. Check anything decisive against their current documentation.

What does Fathom do for a group of Xero entities?

Fathom consolidates companies from Xero, QuickBooks, MYOB or Excel into a group, converts them into one presentation currency, applies intercompany eliminations, and reports budgets and KPIs at group level. Its consolidations page says a group can hold up to 300 entities, with multi-currency consolidations supported up to 50, and that 97 currencies are available using default historical rates from openexchangerates.org or rates you set yourself. A consistent chart of accounts across entities is recommended but not required.

Eliminations come in two forms, according to Fathom’s help centre. An account holding only intercompany amounts can be eliminated in full, automatically, for every period. Where an account mixes intercompany and outside amounts, specific values are entered through a separate eliminations company, imported from Excel and entered each period. Eliminations are part of the Fathom Pro plan.

Fathom is open about its limits. Its consolidations page describes it as a management reporting tool for internal reporting, not a statutory one, and says partial ownership and minority interests are not natively supported.

Where is Fathom the stronger choice?

Fathom is stronger in three places, and any one of them could settle it.

Intercompany eliminations. APBuddy Reporting does not currently perform them — they are on our roadmap, not in the product. Fathom does, automatically for whole intercompany accounts.

Budgets and forecasting. Fathom reports group budgets against actuals, and its Pro plan is described as covering reporting, forecasting and consolidation. We offer neither budgeting nor forecasting.

Breadth of use. Fathom is built for businesses and for accounting firms; its Portfolio plan exists so a firm can oversee its whole client base. It also takes data from QuickBooks, MYOB and Excel as well as Xero. APBuddy Reporting is built around Xero organisations within one group, onboarded with you, one group at a time. A practice, or a group with entities outside Xero, is better served by Fathom.

Fathom also publishes its pricing — monthly, based on how many companies you connect, with a 14-day free trial. Access to APBuddy Reporting is private and starts with a call.

Where does APBuddy Reporting fit instead?

APBuddy Reporting fits a Xero group whose recurring problem is not producing a consolidated report but being sure it is complete and final — that the books closed, nothing was entered twice across entities, and nothing was silently left out.

Close lag is measured, not assumed. Every journal carries the period it hits and the date it was entered, and the gap shows, by value and by entity, how much of a month was still moving after sign-off. Our guide on measuring when a close actually finished explains the method.

Duplicates are looked for across entity boundaries, matched on account, amount and normalised description within fourteen days. Accounts that posted in four of the previous five months and went quiet are flagged as possible missed accruals; lines more than three standard deviations above an account’s twelve-month norm are flagged as outliers. The close controls page gives every threshold.

Gaps understate visibly. Unmapped accounts are excluded from the totals and listed separately with their value and entity. A missing FX rate puts a warning on the consolidated reports with the untranslated amount per currency. Rates are stored per period, so a restated period reproduces the figures you published.

Analysis is traceable. Board briefs and month-end memos are written from the consolidated figures and saved with citations to the periods, entities and accounts behind each number, as the AI analysis page describes.

None of this is a claim that Fathom has no equivalent. If these checks matter to you, ask any vendor you trial to run them on a month you have already closed.

How do the two compare side by side?

	Fathom	APBuddy Reporting
Built for	Businesses, advisors and accounting firms	Finance teams in multi-entity groups on Xero
Ledgers	Xero, QuickBooks, MYOB, Excel	Xero
Intercompany eliminations	Whole accounts automatically; specific values entered each period	Not yet; on the roadmap
Currency	97 currencies; default rates from openexchangerates.org, or your own	Average rate for P&L, closing for balance sheet, stored per period
Budgets and forecasting	Yes	Not offered
Minority interests	Not natively supported	Not supported
Close lag, cross-entity duplicates, missed accruals	Ask them to show you	Built in, across every entity
Pricing model	Published, by number of companies connected; 14-day trial	Private access, starting with a call

How should you decide?

If you need eliminations in your group numbers now, budgets and forecasts in the same tool, or one product across many companies and more than one ledger, choose Fathom. It does those things and we do not, and it is better to know that before a call than after one.

If your group is on Xero, intercompany is light or handled elsewhere, and the question you keep failing to answer is whether a group figure is complete and final, that is the problem APBuddy Reporting is built for. If a spreadsheet still covers it, the Excel comparison says when that is the honest answer.