The finance director of a 12-entity hospitality group had been using Fathom for two years. Her team loved the dashboards. When the group acquired three companies in New Zealand, she expected Fathom to handle the consolidated reporting just as smoothly. Within a month she was manually reconciling intercompany loans in Excel, calculating cumulative translation adjustments on a spreadsheet, and asking her auditors why the consolidated balance sheet wouldn’t balance. Fathom had not failed her — she had been using the wrong tool for the job.
That distinction matters enormously when you are evaluating software. This article sets out a direct BrizoConsol vs Fathom comparison — what each platform actually does, where each excels, and which one is right for groups that need true financial consolidation.
What Is Fathom and What Does It Do Well?
Fathom is a financial reporting and analysis platform, built primarily for accountants and business owners who want beautiful dashboards, KPI tracking, and performance reports from their accounting data. It connects to Xero, QuickBooks and MYOB and pulls through transactional data to produce charts, management reports and forecasts.
For a single-entity business, or a franchise group looking at individual unit performance side-by-side, Fathom is genuinely excellent. Its strengths include:
- Polished, client-ready PDF and online reports
- KPI dashboards with targets and traffic-light alerts
- Entity consolidation by simple aggregation across a group
- Forecasting and budgeting at the entity level
- White-labelling for accounting firms managing multiple clients
The key phrase above is simple aggregation. Fathom can add up the revenue lines from five entities and show a group total. That is not the same as true financial consolidation.
Where Fathom Falls Short for True Consolidation
For groups with intercompany transactions, foreign subsidiaries, minority interests, or audit-ready obligations, simple aggregation introduces material errors. Three specific gaps stand out in any honest financial consolidation software comparison:
Intercompany eliminations
When a parent entity charges a management fee to a subsidiary, that transaction must be eliminated from the consolidated accounts. If it is not, group revenue and group expenses are both overstated by the same amount. Fathom does not automate these elimination journals. The accountant must adjust manually — either in the source ledger or after export — which creates reconciliation risk and audit trail problems.
Cumulative translation adjustment (CTA)
Under IAS 21 and most GAAP frameworks, translating the financial statements of a foreign subsidiary involves applying closing rates to balance sheet items and average rates to the income statement. The resulting exchange difference must be recognised in Other Comprehensive Income (OCI) and presented as a separate component of equity. Fathom applies the correct exchange rates but stops short of a complete solution: calculating the CTA requires downloading an Excel report, manually reading restatement notes, computing the adjustment figure, entering it into a separate Excel-based eliminations file, and importing it back into Fathom. More fundamentally, Fathom has no OCI account classification — meaning the CTA cannot be correctly presented in equity as IAS 21 requires. The workaround relies on a user-defined account, and the classification is left entirely to the accountant.
Non-controlling interest (NCI)
If a parent owns 75% of a subsidiary, the remaining 25% must be recognised as a non-controlling interest in the consolidated balance sheet and income statement. Fathom has no mechanism to calculate or present NCI. For groups with partial ownership structures, this is a fundamental gap.
The core distinction: Fathom is a reporting and analysis tool. It aggregates and visualises data that already exists in your ledgers. BrizoConsol is a consolidation platform. It performs the GAAP-compliant calculations — eliminations, CTA, NCI — that produce consolidated accounts your auditors can sign off on.
BrizoConsol vs Fathom: Feature-by-Feature Comparison
| Feature | BrizoConsol | Fathom |
|---|---|---|
| Xero, QuickBooks, MYOB, Zoho Books integration | ✓ Direct API — all four | ⚡ Xero, QB, MYOB (not Zoho) |
| Automated intercompany eliminations | ✓ Full automation with audit trail | ✗ Manual / not supported |
| Multi-currency CTA calculation (IAS 21) | ✓ Closing rate / average rate engine | ⚡ Manual Excel workaround; no OCI classification |
| Non-controlling interest (NCI) | ✓ Automated NCI calculations | ✗ Not supported |
| IFRS / US GAAP / UK GAAP tagging | ✓ Framework-level tagging | ✗ Not supported |
| Virtual Groups (region / brand rollups) | ✓ Unlimited Virtual Groups | ⚡ Partial — folder grouping only |
| Consolidated P&L, Balance Sheet, Cash Flow | ✓ On-demand, audit-ready | ⚡ Aggregated P&L and BS only |
| Audit trail on consolidation adjustments | ✓ Full adjustment log | ✗ Not applicable |
| AI Auto-Map for chart of accounts | ✓ Automated CoA mapping | ✗ Manual mapping |
| KPI dashboards and performance reports | ⚡ Consolidated metrics reporting | ✓ Core strength |
| Client-facing PDF reports | ⚡ Export available | ✓ Core strength — white-label ready |
| Forecasting and budgeting | ✗ Not in scope | ✓ Entity-level forecasting |
| Free trial available | ✓ brizoconsol.com/register | ✓ Trial available |
⚡ = partial or limited support | ✓ = full support | ✗ = not supported. Based on publicly available product information as at June 2026. Check vendor documentation for the latest details.
Where BrizoConsol Goes Further for Group Finance
BrizoConsol was built exclusively for multi-entity consolidation. Unlike reporting tools that add consolidation as a secondary feature, every part of the platform exists to solve group accounting problems:
Direct API integration — no CSV exports
BrizoConsol connects directly to Xero, QuickBooks, MYOB and Zoho Books via live API. The moment an invoice is posted in a subsidiary ledger, it is available in the consolidation engine. There is no manual export, no file upload, no version-control problem. For a group using a mix of accounting platforms across its entities, this matters enormously.
Elimination automation at scale
Consider a group with 15 entities across multiple jurisdictions, each trading with several others. The intercompany matrix can easily produce 40–60 elimination entries per month. BrizoConsol matches intercompany balances, flags mismatches, and generates the elimination journals automatically. Every adjustment is logged with a full audit trail — crucial when an auditor asks why two lines net to zero.
Real CTA — not a workaround
For any group with foreign subsidiaries, the cumulative translation adjustment is one of the most error-prone items in a set of consolidated accounts. BrizoConsol applies closing exchange rates to balance sheet items and average rates to P&L items, then calculates the resulting CTA movement and posts it to equity — in accordance with IAS 21. This is not an approximation. It is the calculation your auditors expect.
“The question isn’t which tool is better — it’s which tool is right for the job. Fathom is a reporting platform. BrizoConsol is a consolidation platform. Choosing between them depends on what your group actually needs.”
IFRS, US GAAP and UK GAAP tagging
For groups reporting under multiple frameworks — perhaps IFRS for the group and UK GAAP for a subsidiary — BrizoConsol tags balances at the framework level. This eliminates the risk of a GAAP adjustment appearing in the wrong set of accounts.
Which Tool Should You Choose?
The answer depends on what your group needs from its financial software.
Choose Fathom if: your group entities do not transact with each other, you do not have foreign subsidiaries requiring currency translation, and your priority is producing polished management dashboards and reports for boards or investor updates. Fathom is excellent at this, and for straightforward multi-entity groups it does the job elegantly.
Choose BrizoConsol if: your group has intercompany transactions that need eliminating, foreign subsidiaries that require CTA, minority ownership structures with NCI, or an obligation to produce audit-ready consolidated financial statements under IFRS, US GAAP or UK GAAP. In these scenarios, simple aggregation will introduce errors that accumulate — and that auditors will find.
Some groups use both. Fathom handles client-facing performance reports and KPI dashboards at the entity level; BrizoConsol handles the statutory consolidation at group level. The two tools solve different problems and are not direct substitutes for each other.
What they are not, however, is interchangeable. A group that replaces Fathom with BrizoConsol gains statutory consolidation it never had. A group that replaces BrizoConsol with Fathom loses the elimination, CTA and NCI capabilities it depends on — and will find those gaps quickly at year-end.
If you are currently using Fathom and producing intercompany eliminations or CTA adjustments manually — in Excel, in the ledger, or in a side schedule — the time cost and error risk of those workarounds is the cost of not having the right tool. BrizoConsol connects to your existing Xero, QuickBooks, MYOB or Zoho Books entities directly and removes those workarounds entirely.
Legal Disclaimer: This page contains a comparison of BrizoConsol and Fathom based on publicly available product documentation, support articles, and feature pages as at June 2026. The information is provided for general informational purposes only and is subject to change without notice. BrizoSystem Pte Ltd makes no representations as to the completeness or accuracy of information relating to third-party products and accepts no liability for decisions made on the basis of this comparison. Readers are advised to verify all third-party feature claims directly with the relevant vendor before making any purchasing decision. BrizoConsol and BrizoSystem are trademarks of BrizoSystem Pte Ltd. All third-party product names and trademarks are the property of their respective owners and are referenced solely for identification and comparison purposes.