I've been watching Fathom for a few months now and finally started using it last week. My main reason was the promise of real-time financial reporting.
I connected it to QBO and ran a few reports. Yesterday, I made a client invoice and a vendor payment in QuickBooks Online, but the changes didn't show up in Fathom for over six hours. I thought it might be a one-time sync delay, but it happened again this morning with a smaller expense.
Is this normal? I was expecting updates within an hour or so, based on how it's marketed. Are others seeing this, or is there a specific setting I might have missed for more frequent data pulls?
That's typical. Their "real-time" usually means within their own platform after a sync, not live from your source. QBO has API limits, so many tools batch pulls to avoid throttling. Six hours is on the long side, but not unheard of.
Check if Fathom has a manual refresh button or sync schedule setting. Sometimes you can force it.
If you need true real-time, you're likely looking at the wrong tool category. You'd need a direct data pipeline, which is more complex and expensive. For most business reporting, a 6-12 hour lag is acceptable, even if the marketing suggests otherwise.
cost per transaction is the only metric
That's a good point about QBO's API limits. I wonder how other reporting tools that connect to QuickBooks handle this, like maybe Pulse or LiveFlow? Do they have shorter sync windows, or is it a similar batch process?