Fathom Pricing vs LiveFlow Pricing: QuickBooks Reporting Tools Compared

Fathom and LiveFlow both sit on top of QuickBooks and both get called QuickBooks reporting tools, but they solve opposite problems. Fathom produces a finished, brandable management report pack with analysis and benchmarking built in, from A$59 a month excluding GST. LiveFlow pipes live QuickBooks data into Google Sheets and Excel so you can build the report yourself, and publishes no price at all. Pick Fathom if you want the document. Pick LiveFlow if you want the data in a spreadsheet you control. Both pricing pages were read on 24 August 2026.

That framing matters more than any feature table, because the two products are rarely a genuine head-to-head. Most buyers who shortlist both are actually deciding between two different working styles, and once you know which one you are, the choice takes about ten minutes.

Fathom vs LiveFlow: the short version

Fathom and LiveFlow compared, vendor pricing pages read 24 August 2026

	Fathom	LiveFlow
Core job	Analysis, KPIs and a finished report pack	Live ledger data inside Sheets and Excel
Entry price	44/mo in the currency shown to you, one company, ex tax	No published price, demo booking only
Next tiers	250 for 10 companies, 375 for 25, 645 for 50	Quoted on entity count and features
Currency	Matched to your region, no single global list	Not published
Where you work	In Fathom's own interface	In Google Sheets or Excel
Output	Brandable PDF report packs, KPI dashboards, benchmarking	Whatever you build in the spreadsheet
Forecasting	Cash flow forecasting on all plans	Budgeting and forecasting in-sheet
Best for	Advisors who present to clients and boards	Finance teams who already live in spreadsheets

Fathom lists unlimited brandable reports, in-depth analysis, group benchmarking, multi-currency consolidations, cash flow forecasting and unlimited users on every tier, including the A$59 Starter plan. There is no feature gating by price, only company count, which is unusual in this category and genuinely buyer-friendly. Extra companies beyond the tier allowance cost A$59, A$31, A$17 and A$13 each as you move up the tiers.

LiveFlow's pricing page carries one line, "Pricing is tailored to what you need," and a Book a Demo button. That has been true on every check we have run this year. Third-party review sites put single-entity quotes in the region of $50 to $150 a month and multi-entity quotes at $500 a month and up, but those are estimates from users, not published rates, and you should treat them as such.

What does Fathom actually produce?

A management report pack. You connect QuickBooks, Xero or a spreadsheet import, Fathom pulls the ledger, and you assemble a report from a library of pre-built pages: profitability analysis, KPI trends against targets, cash flow, ratio analysis, and a benchmark comparison against companies in the same industry. The output is a branded PDF you send to a client or a board.

The benchmarking is the piece nothing else in this price band does well. Fathom compares a company's margins and ratios against an industry set, which turns a report from a description into an argument: your gross margin is 34 percent, the industry runs 41, here is the gap. For an accountant selling advisory work rather than compliance work, that is the slide that wins the engagement.

The limits are worth knowing before you buy. Fathom publishes no single global price list: its pricing page renders in a currency matched to the region you browse from, excluding applicable taxes, so the number a US buyer should budget is the one their own connection returns rather than the one quoted in a comparison article. Its analysis lives inside Fathom's interface, so if your process depends on manipulating numbers in a spreadsheet, you will be exporting more than you expected. And the report pack is a presentation of the ledger, not a formal statement set: it is not designed to be the audited-format financial statements a lender or a CPA engagement calls for. Our fuller breakdown, including where Fathom beats us, is on Fathom alternative.

What does LiveFlow actually produce?

Nothing, on its own, and that is the point. LiveFlow is a pipe. It keeps a live connection between QuickBooks or Xero and a Google Sheet or Excel workbook, so the numbers in your model refresh instead of being pasted in every month. What lands in front of the reader is whatever you built in that spreadsheet.

For a finance team with an existing model that works, this is the highest-value product in the category, because it removes the export-and-paste step without asking anyone to change how they work. Multi-entity consolidation, custom groupings and any report shape you can express in formulas are all available, since it is just a spreadsheet. Refreshes happen on a schedule rather than by hand, which kills the most common reporting error there is: a report built on last month's paste.

For everyone else it is the wrong shape. If you do not already have a model, LiveFlow gives you a connection and a blank sheet, and you are now maintaining a spreadsheet model as an ongoing job. Spreadsheet models break in well-documented ways: a formula range that does not extend to a new row, a manual override pasted over a formula, a prior period edited without anyone noticing. LiveFlow keeps the data fresh; it does not keep the model correct. The full comparison sits on LiveFlow alternative.

Which one should I choose for QuickBooks reporting?

Answer three questions and the choice usually makes itself.

Do you already have a spreadsheet model you trust? If yes, LiveFlow. You are buying a refresh button for something that already works, and no packaged report tool will match a model built around your own business. If no, do not buy LiveFlow expecting it to hand you one.

Are you presenting to someone else, or reading it yourself? Presenting to clients, boards or investors pushes you toward Fathom, because the branded pack and the benchmarking are built for exactly that meeting and building the equivalent in Sheets is a project. If the report never leaves your desk, presentation polish is not worth paying for.

How many entities? One entity keeps every option open. Ten or more makes price the deciding factor fast, and this is where Fathom's published tiers become an advantage over a quote you cannot compare. At 25 companies Fathom is A$450 a month with everything included. What LiveFlow costs at 25 entities is unknowable without a sales call, which is itself information about who they sell to.

One case sits outside both: if what you actually need is the formal statement set, a P&L, balance sheet and cash flow statement tied to each other in the format a lender or an accountant expects, neither tool is aimed at that job. That is what a financial report generator does, and it is a different purchase for a different reader. If the pack then has to become slides for a board meeting, turning the finished report into a deck built from the document itself is a cleaner path than rebuilding the numbers in a presentation tool.

How much does LiveFlow cost compared to Fathom?

Fathom starts at A$59 a month excluding GST for one company and publishes every tier up to A$805 for fifty. LiveFlow does not publish a price and quotes after a demo. On the day we checked, that is the entire honest comparison, and any article that gives you a precise LiveFlow number is reporting a third-party estimate as though it were a rate.

The pattern is worth noticing when you shop this whole category. Vendors that publish prices are selling to buyers who compare on a web page: owners, small firms, single entities. Vendors that hide prices are selling to buyers who go through procurement, and the price is set by your size. Neither approach is dishonest, but if you are a one-entity business and a vendor will not show you a number, they are usually telling you politely that you are not the customer. The full nine-vendor price table is on financial reporting software under $100 a month, and the wider QuickBooks-specific shortlist is on financial reporting software for QuickBooks.

Do I need either one if I already have QuickBooks?

Often not, and it is worth ruling the purchase out before making it. QuickBooks produces correct reports. What it does not do is group two hundred accounts into twelve readable lines, place several periods side by side without setup, consolidate multiple company files, or explain what changed. If none of those four gaps is costing you real time, adding a reporting layer is a subscription with no return.

Three free fixes come first. Set up memorized report groups in QuickBooks so the same pack runs each month with one click. Fix the chart of accounts, because most unreadable reports are unreadable at the ledger level and no tool downstream fixes that. And use the built-in comparative columns, which most users never turn on. What QuickBooks gives you and where it genuinely stops is set out on QuickBooks financial statements.

The other thing neither tool does is fix the books. A reporting layer presents whatever the ledger holds. If transactions are uncategorized or the bank feed has not been reconciled in four months, Fathom will benchmark a mess and LiveFlow will pipe it into a spreadsheet on a schedule. Clean the ledger first, every time.

Is Fathom or LiveFlow better for accounting firms?

Fathom, for most firms, on price transparency and per-client economics. A firm carrying 25 client files knows what Fathom costs before it calls anyone, and the per-company rate falls as the count rises. Fathom also ships a separate Portfolio product for firms monitoring larger client bases, which is priced for monitoring rather than deep reporting on each file.

LiveFlow suits a narrower firm profile: one that has already standardized on a spreadsheet deliverable across its client base and wants to stop pasting. That firm exists and LiveFlow is excellent for it, but it is not the median practice.

Firms whose deliverable is a formal statement set rather than a management pack are shopping a third category entirely, where the comparison is against CaseWare and the write-up tools rather than against either of these. That decision is worked through on financial statement drafting software, and the vendor-by-vendor view of the whole market is on financial reporting software.

The honest disclosure

We make a competing product, so read the above with that in mind. AIStatements does a narrower job than either tool here: it takes a QuickBooks, Xero, trial balance or CSV export and produces the three formal statements tied together, with written analysis. It does not benchmark against an industry set the way Fathom does, and it does not give you a live spreadsheet connection the way LiveFlow does. If either of those is what you need, buy theirs.

Our own plans are on the pricing page if you want a third figure to compare.