LiveFlow vs Fathom vs Reach Reporting for 2 to 10 QuickBooks companies

All three consolidate QuickBooks Online companies, so LiveFlow vs Fathom vs Reach Reporting comes down to where the work happens and how they charge. Fathom is a reporting platform priced by companies included (1, 10, 25 or 50, plus a per-company add-on), with consolidated groups free. Reach Reporting is a spreadsheet-style platform priced by data connection ($149 a month for one, $290 for ten, $550 for twenty-five) with consolidation and unlimited users on every plan. LiveFlow lives in Google Sheets and Excel, publishes no price, and third-party estimates start at $500 a month plus an implementation fee. For two to ten entities, the connection count is most of the price.

Who this comparison is for

This is written for an owner, or the bookkeeper who works for one, with between two and ten QuickBooks Online files. Not a firm with a hundred clients, and not a company with a finance team. A QuickBooks Community thread from March 2025 describes the situation: fifteen entities, combined by hand in Excel each month, and an owner asking for eliminations and budget versus actual. LiveFlow's own May 2026 survey, a vendor survey so read it as one, found that 78 percent of finance leaders still move data between systems by manual spreadsheet export. That is what these tools sell against.

Consolidation is the adding together of several companies' financial statements into one set, as if they were a single business, after canceling anything they bought from or lent to each other.

The comparison pages that rank for these searches are written by a vendor or a listing site. None prices out a real two-, five- and ten-entity owner, and none scores on the jobs an owner has. This one does both, with caveats where the vendor pages made them necessary.

The five jobs to score on

An owner with several files wants five things from a tool like this. Total cash across every account this morning. Profit by entity for last month, with the intercompany charges canceled. What changed since the month before and why. A pack a lender or a partner can read. And a plain answer to a plain question, such as which company lost money in August.

The first four are report-builder jobs, and all three tools are built for them, while the fifth is a different kind of job, which is why there is a fourth column in the table below. The wider roundup of QuickBooks reporting tools covers tools that only do one or two of the five.

What each vendor's page says about price

Prices below are monthly, list, in US dollars, as the vendor pages read on 23 September 2026, with the caveats that follow the table.

Fathom's pricing page served us Australian dollars, with a note reading "Prices shown in $AUD. Excluding GST", so the entity limits below are from Fathom's own page and the US dollar figures are not. From the page: Starter includes one company, Silver ten, Gold twenty-five and Platinum fifty, each with a per-company add-on, and every plan lists unlimited users, multi-currency consolidation and cash flow forecasting. In Australian dollars we saw Starter at $59 plus $59 per extra company, Silver at $315 plus $31, Gold at $450 plus $17 and Platinum at $805 plus $13. Third-party US dollar listings disagree by about 6 percent: Capterra lists Starter $50, Silver $260, Gold $380 and Platinum $680; Coefficient's May 2026 comparison lists $53, $280, $400 and $720. Fathom's calculator page says consolidated groups are free and unlimited. Before you budget, open the calculator in a US browser and take the figure from Fathom.

Reach Reporting's page is in US dollars and priced by connection: one connection for $149 a month with $149 per additional, ten for $290 with $29 per additional, twenty-five for $550 with $22 per additional. Annual plans are $1,548, $2,436 and $4,620. Every plan lists unlimited users, multi-currency consolidation, cash flow projections, a Google Sheets integration and a 30-day trial without a card. Two connections on the single plan cost $298, so the ten-connection plan is cheaper from the second file onward.

LiveFlow's pricing page has no plans and no prices. The heading reads "Pricing is tailored to what you need", followed by a demo button and a feature list that includes multi-entity consolidation, AR and AP reporting, budgeting and forecasting and budget versus actuals. No entity limit is stated. Coefficient's comparison, updated May 2026, estimates $500 and up a month, about $2,500 for implementation, and $8,500 to $10,000 or more for the first year. Eightx's June 2026 write-up repeats those numbers, adds per-seat estimates of $30 to $100 and up on annual contracts, and states plainly that every LiveFlow dollar figure in it is a third-party estimate. We could not do better without a sales call, and neither can you.

Where the work happens

A data connection is one QuickBooks Online company file linked to the tool. Most vendors price by it, whatever they call it.

Fathom describes its own approach, in its July 2026 comparison with Reach, as "polished, template-based reporting and advisory-ready forecasting", and describes Reach as offering a "spreadsheet-native editing experience" with "a single, feature-inclusive pricing model based on the number of data connections". Those are fair summaries, and they are the real difference. In Fathom you pick a template and fill it. In Reach you build the report in something that behaves like a sheet. LiveFlow puts the live numbers inside the Google Sheet or Excel workbook you already keep, so the report is your spreadsheet, refreshed.

That decides who maintains the thing. A template needs an advisor to set up and then runs. A sheet-like editor needs a person who likes building reports, usually the bookkeeper. A live spreadsheet needs a finance person who is comfortable with formulas and will notice when a mapping breaks. Common advice is to pick whichever is cheapest at your entity count. At five entities the two published prices are about $30 apart, so we would ignore price and ask who will keep the mapping current.

Eliminations, mapping and the same-chart problem

Intercompany elimination is the entry that cancels a transaction between two of your companies, such as a management fee, before they are added together, so that the group's revenue and expense are not overstated.

All three claim multi-entity consolidation. Fathom's July 2026 blog puts its limit at 300 entities for single-currency groups and 50 for multi-currency; Reach and LiveFlow state no limit. What none of the pages shows is the elimination workflow: whether the entry is typed once and recurs, whether the tool warns when the two sides disagree, and what happens when a bookkeeper posts the fee to a different account in one file. How eliminations work explains what to look for, and it is the one thing to test with real files before paying for a year.

Account mapping is the table that tells a consolidation tool which account in file A adds to which account in file B when the names differ.

Every one of these tools needs either an identical chart of accounts across files or a map you maintain. Intuit's own Spreadsheet Sync, which needs QuickBooks Online Advanced at $340 a month list, combines accounts only if they have the same name, type and level, and does no eliminations; what Spreadsheet Sync does covers where it stops. The third-party tools are more forgiving about names, which is a relief on day one and a maintenance job on day ninety.

All three read from QuickBooks Online and none writes back to it. That matters more since July 2026, when Intuit's own ChatGPT and Claude connectors arrived able to create and delete invoices, and it is worth confirming on each vendor's connection screen rather than taking it from a comparison.

LiveFlow vs Fathom vs Reach: who should pick which

Fathom suits an advisor-led monthly pack: an outside accountant sets up the template, the owner gets a consistent PDF, and the price for ten companies is a few hundred dollars. Reach suits an owner or bookkeeper who wants to build the report themselves in a sheet-like editor and pay per connection with no user cap. LiveFlow suits a finance person who already lives in Google Sheets, wants the numbers live in workbooks they own, and has the budget and patience for a quoted contract and an onboarding project.

Navigator is a different kind of tool and sits in the same table because it is bought by the same owner for the same problem. It connects read-only to each QuickBooks Online file, refreshes daily, and answers questions in plain words with the source transaction cited, in the app or in a Slack or Teams thread, with a morning brief by email; the consolidated view is on the base plan, and intercompany elimination, forecasting and the one-click packs are on Pro. It has no custom report designer, and it is the most expensive column at ten entities by a wide margin. What the other three do not do is answer "which company lost money in August" without someone building that report first. The tiers are on the pricing page.

This comparison has limits. It is built from the vendors' own pages on one day, two of which publish prices and one of which does not, and a feature list says what a tool has, not how long it takes to make it work with a bookkeeper's imperfect files.

The trial test

All three offer a trial or a demo, and Reach's is 30 days without a card. Connect two real files, not the sample company. Ask for total cash across both. Then book a management fee from one to the other and ask for a consolidated P&L with it canceled, and time both jobs, because if the second needs a support ticket, that is your answer about the elimination workflow. Consolidating several QuickBooks Online companies describes what the finished result should look like, whichever tool produces it.

Questions owners ask

Which is cheaper for five companies, Fathom or Reach Reporting?

On list prices they are within a few dollars of each other. Reach Reporting's ten-connection plan is $290 a month in US dollars from its own page. Fathom's Silver plan includes ten companies, and third-party listings put it at $260 to $280 in US dollars, though Fathom's page showed us Australian dollars, so confirm on its calculator. Both include unlimited users, so at five entities the decision is about the editor, not the price.

How much does LiveFlow cost?

LiveFlow does not publish a price. Its pricing page says pricing is tailored to what you need and offers a demo. Coefficient's comparison, updated May 2026, estimates $500 a month and up with about $2,500 for implementation, and Eightx's June 2026 write-up repeats those figures with per-seat estimates and says every dollar figure is a third-party estimate. Treat them that way and ask for a written quote.

Does Fathom charge for consolidated groups?

No. Fathom's calculator page says consolidated groups are free of charge and there is no limit on how many you can create. You pay for the companies you connect, either through the plan's included count or the per-company add-on. Fathom's July 2026 blog puts the limit at 300 entities for a single-currency group and 50 for a multi-currency group, which is far beyond what an owner with ten files needs.

Can these tools do intercompany eliminations?

All three describe multi-entity consolidation, which implies eliminations. What we cannot tell you from their pages is how the elimination is entered, whether it recurs each month, and whether the tool checks that the two sides match. That is the one workflow to test in a trial with your own files: book the management fee, consolidate, and see whether it cancels without a manual adjustment.

Do they need the same chart of accounts in every QuickBooks file?

All of them need a way to line up accounts across files, either an identical chart or a mapping you maintain. Intuit's own Spreadsheet Sync only combines accounts with the same name, type and level. A tool that lets you map differently named accounts saves a cleanup, but the map still has to be kept when a bookkeeper adds an account, so ask who is going to maintain it.

Related

If the question is whether to consolidate inside QuickBooks instead, QuickBooks Online Advanced vs Intuit Enterprise Suite for multi-entity covers Intuit's own options. For the balance sheet side of a roll-up, read consolidated balance sheet in QuickBooks Online, and for the mechanics of the canceling entries, intercompany eliminations explained.

If you would rather run the same two-file test on the fourth column, the trial takes about fifteen minutes per file and asks for no card: navigatorhq.ai.

Published 26 Sep 2026. Last updated 26 Sep 2026. Reviewed by a CFO on the Navigator team.