RunSmart
Fathom
The Best Small Business Financial Planning Alternative
Choosing between Fathom and RunSmart comes down to your role and how you use financial data. Both platforms work with accounting data, but they are designed for very different users and workflows. This page helps explain those differences so you can decide which approach fits your needs.
How Fathom and RunSmart Are Fundamentally Different
The Core Question:
Do you primarily need financial reporting and analysis, or financial planning and decision support? That distinction explains nearly every difference between the two platforms.
Who Each Platform Is Built For
Each platform is designed for a different type of user and workflow. Understanding who it’s built for is often the fastest way to determine which one fits your needs.
Key Difference — Reporting vs Decision Support
Both platforms help you work with financial data, but they answer fundamentally different questions. One is designed to help you understand and present what has already happened, while the other is built to help you evaluate decisions and understand what happens next.
Operational Planning Is Where the Tools Diverge Most
Understanding performance is only part of the equation—business decisions ultimately determine where things go next. This is where the difference between analysis and planning becomes most apparent, especially when evaluating real-world choices like hiring, spending, or taking on debt.
Business Health & Insights
Financial metrics on their own don’t always tell you what to do next. The real value comes from understanding what those numbers mean for your business and where things are heading. This is where how each platform delivers insight becomes critically different.
Summary Comparision
If you’re still unsure which platform is the better fit, this quick comparison summarizes the biggest differences at a glance.
Decision Factor
Choose Fathom If…
Choose RunSmart If…
Primary User
Accountant, CFO, Advisor
Business Owner or Accountant / CFO
Main Goal
Reporting & analysis
Planning & decisions
Comfort with Finance
High
Low to moderate
Entity Structure
Multiple entities
Single business
Output Style
Board-ready reports
Actionable guidance
Planning Focus
Financial modeling
Operational decisions
Final Thought
Fathom and RunSmart are not substitutes in the traditional sense — they reflect two different philosophies:
Understanding that difference usually makes the choice clear.
Disclaimer
This comparison is based on publicly available information and our understanding of each platform’s intended use cases. Product features and capabilities may change over time.
Real insights. Real decisions.
Frequent Asked Questions
More asnswers to common questions about how RunSmart works and what you can expect.
RunSmart is built specifically for small business owners who need a clear understanding of where their business stands today and how decisions will shape what comes next. While many FP&A platforms emphasize dashboards and complex configuration, RunSmart focuses on turning your QuickBooks data into practical financial intelligence you can act on.
It continuously analyzes historical performance, highlights meaningful financial shifts, and provides a clear view of your current financial health across profitability, cash flow, and growth. At the same time, it generates forward-looking forecasts that help you evaluate the financial impact of hiring, pricing changes, borrowing, or expansion before committing capital.
The result is a platform designed to help you understand your business today, plan confidently for tomorrow, and make informed decisions without the overhead of traditional enterprise tools.
Not at all. RunSmart is designed to be easy to use. We handle all calculations and generate forecasts automatically so you don’t have to. That said, to deliver reliable results, your books need to be clean, up to date, and properly categorized every month. If you’re unsure about your bookkeeping quality, we recommend working with a professional bookkeeper first to get things in order.
RunSmart’s forecasts are built to support real business decisions, not just generate projections. Instead of relying on simplified assumptions, RunSmart uses advanced statistical models that account for seasonality, long term trends, and volatility in your historical QuickBooks data.
By continuously analyzing performance patterns and financial shifts, RunSmart produces rolling forecasts that reflect how your business actually behaves. The result is forward looking projections you can confidently use to evaluate hiring, pricing, borrowing, and growth decisions.
To ensure reliable forecasts, we require a minimum of 2 consecutive years of historical financial data in your QuickBooks Online account to use RunSmart. Anything less than 2 years does not provide enough data to identify seasonal patterns or trends effectively.
No. RunSmart is intentionally designed for single-entity businesses and does not support consolidating multiple companies or budgeting by class.
In many small businesses, consolidating financial data or budgeting across multiple classes can make it harder to clearly identify where issues are developing. RunSmart focuses on analyzing each business independently so trends, risks, and performance changes are easier to detect and address.
These types of consolidation and class-level budgeting tools are typically designed for large finance teams managing complex corporate structures. RunSmart instead prioritizes clear forecasts, financial diagnostics, and decision insights that small business owners and advisors can quickly understand and act on—without the added complexity of enterprise finance features.
At this time, we currently only support an integration with QuickBooks Online.
