Karbon Features

Email tracking and assigning to clients and their monthly projects

The workflow was harder to use and the learning curve much longer than I wanted to spend

Client communication is so simple yet secure. Automation works very well. It integrates with other products that I use.

Lack of control over sorting of work items in kanban so it's hard to practice first-in first-out workflow. Lack of flexibility in the templates so it's hard to do A/B testing and continuous improvement.

Sorting works and then individual tasks are great. Also, the auto-remind option is a huge time saver for our firm! I also really like the internal and external comments functions.

The analytics are a bit clunky to set up. It'd be really nice to be able to see projected budgeting, etc... but unless you have fixed prices for everything, it doesn't work and takes a long time to set up.

Workflow functionality is great. Resource planning workbook is great.

Not well designed for longer duration projects. Limited to work with a duration of no longer than one week, otherwise manually intensive process to create longer duration work items.

I love the system in general. The personal training for team members was amazing. Additionally, it is wonderful to work with a company that really listens to feedback and suggestions. There are constant improvements and upgrades that the development team rolls out based on customer needs. All of the above combined with the basic features have made the product addictive! I truly cannot imagine my workday without Karbon.

It's a big investment for a small firm. I wish that the cost would come down a bit. However, if used properly this product can increase efficiency assisting to create capacity within a firm. It was also difficult to get full team "buy-in". There is a lot of initial set-up required to create full usability; however, once the time is invested it pays HUGE dividends by way of efficiency and standardized processes.

I like the efficiency of Karbon. Karbon has been a great workflow management tool.

I do not have reasons to dislike Karbon. Karbon is so amazing.

Allows me to have a wholistic view of our company through tools like My Week. Very useful to be able to manage and allocate work at the beginning of the week through the my week tool. Triage and the ability to assign/tasks/emails/mentions to employees, clients or client specific work. There is also an integration coming with suit files that will be very useful for practices i.e. some features that will come are document signing client portal integrations, and document management. This will help us automate a lot more. Auto-maters are definitely very useful, partially the ability to automatically change job statuses and assign tasks/work to colleges according where the job is in the process.

Definitely not being able to independently bulk update tasks without having to pay. Bulk update features are very important but not available (unless you pay the $999 build fee package, which might to expensive for some). The lack of integrations are (most notably, not integrating with Xero or XPM). The best option is if you already have Ignition (this allows content to flow from XPM to Ignition than to Karbon). No integrations into CRM systems. Automated do not have an "IF" functionality where if i.e. the client doesn't need to have more documents requested while the work is completed there should be the ability to tick a box that automatically triggers a different work flow.

Well designed workflow management that addresses most of the aspects of information management that accountants need on a daily basis. I cannot imagine going back to a time without it.

No practical option to use custom fields for clients or client groups. Custom reporting is not great if you want to look at your whole database. Basically you have to just dump everything to excel. Not easy to bulk update client records. Requires intervention from Support. No simple csv import.

It's completely streamlined our business, increased profitability and reduced time wasted on looking for things, or duplicating tasks. It's really easy to setup and maintain and you don't need an administrator to manage it for you. We have much more control over our emails now, assigning them to work and colleagues and setting up work such as on-boarding, system setup, or IAS and BAS is a breeze using templates. Client tasks help us receive information from clients in a more timely manner. There are too many features to list! But I'd pretty much tried everything on the market prior to Karbon and this - well it just ticks ALL the boxes and does what it's meant to do!

I'd love to be able to pin a note to the top of the work timelime. But that's not really a con, it's just a feature request!!!

Karbon is a such a great tool for our team communication and overall management of our business. It helps to keep everyone on our team in the know with regards to what is happening with our clients with the easy to use features of assigning tasks, creating to-do lists & checklists, and following up on work. It's also helped take following up with clients off of our plate with their "assign to clients"...

Read more

The only outstanding items right now are Outlook & TSheets features. We'd like to see folders in Karbon for ease of access and organization with emails, along outlook calendar visibility. We'd also like the ability to edit time in Karbon to avoid having to open up the TSheets application to view/edit. But I know they are diligently working on adding additional features and I'm hopeful that we aren't too far away from these.

Thanks to Karbon, we are totally organised and know where we're at all times. With each email, you can either clear from the triage or assign to a colleague with a due date of expected completion which is attached to a piece of work. You will never forget a task again. Their search function make's it easy to locate information from many different platforms within Karbon. Karbon is so user friendly and their support team is the best I've ever experience. Can't rate this product high enough.

No time tracking - but I know it's coming as they listen to their users. Karbon are always looking at ways to improve their product.

Karbon is intuitive and flexible in it's approach to managing our workflow. Their support is on hand if we need it anytime. Using Karbon has revolutionised our Workflow and enabled us to increase efficiency and visibility over the team.

In the beginning Karbon set up and customisation can seem a little daunting

Most of our team already used their email inbox as a todo list, Karbon takes this functionality so much further and incorporates other workflows, CRM and team management. Client Tasks allow automation of regular information requests from clients helping our team focus on the actual work. The fortnightly release sprints are one of our favourite things about Karbon. When we on boarded the Karbon team promised lots of features and everyone has materialised.

Karbon is still missing some basic email functions that can prove frustrating and mean you still need to occasionally switch back to Gmail to get something setup.

We love that all emails are shared with the entire team and that at any one time we can also view the status of any piece of work. The checklists for both our team and our clients are also revolutionary in terms of the way we work.

The reporting functionality is lacking. No calendar view of tasks.

Being able to send automated emails and checklists to clients with reminders is absolutely brilliant You can also create you own templates and roll them out with different timing for each task i.e. after creating the task another task can be due 2 days after which is great

Hard to see a contact task list as the screen is locked about half way down and when you have recurring tasks these are created for about a month so if you say had a daily task and others it’s hard to distinguish between them

The most powerful features of Karbon are the automation elements that allow projects to flow seamlessly through the office. Communication between clients and us is solid, and the fact that the system follows up automatically outstanding client issues takes a huge workload off us.

Document management is still being developed and needs further work, although the current options are quite manageable.

The best decision you need to make if you own a Bookkeeping practice is the choice of your Practice Management software. I believe this is where you should economize on this decision. Karbon is definitely the best option out there. We are thrilled it was our first choice, and we were able to invest our time in such a long-term investment. We have been using Karbon since 2017 (we opened our business in 2016!) and we continue to improve our processes and take advantage of their continuous improvements. 5-star all over!

The CRM part of the software is probably the weakest and clunkier to use. I also don't find it as suitable for internal project development. We use a separate system for this (Notion) and are are very happy to use the two apps parallel.I would LOVE to extend its ability to a very simple support system where a ticket number is automatically generated for the client and those support requests are linked to the client's timeline!

The triage feature for emails and team communications is a massive time saver. Templates for work flows, and the ability to assign, view, review and action items with simple views and filters allows us to easily have a complete picture of where our workflows, outstanding actions and capacity scheduling for resource planning.

Nothing really. Karbon is very responsive to our requests for improvements

We implemented Karbon only a short time ago and I am already seeing significant impact on my time through the ease of delegation of specific tasks and the ownership of those tasks to be able to check provide oversite. My staff has had a similar response and although it has been a learning curve we all see the potential and benefits.

There are a few items around being able to apply templates after work is created (currently you cannot do this only at creation). It also takes the server five minutes or so to show a contact that you add which is a pain when setting up new client work. We had asked to have contact emails imported and although they were provided for some reason they did not get imported (that combined with the delay...

Read more

Karbon has revolutionized Workflow for accountants. Truly taken it to a new level. It does so many things so well that it is hard to not take those features for granted until you compare it to other similar software. Here are some exceptional features While not perfect, the email integration is great Creating and managing projects is relatively easy and painless Client task management is excellent and extremely useful Automations is work is great team collaboration is very good especially at the task level Mostly great utilization of screen realestate.

Todo list is frustrating for me. Being a Franklin Covey person, i want more control over my todo list. I cant export my todo list either which would help mitigate this issue. Not enough control over tasks. Task list can be overwhelming and thus not useful No proactive feedback about assigned tasks or notes. IF I assign someone a task, email or note, I want to know when they have done the work and...

Read more

Our original investigation into programs like Karbon were based on our massive email issue - clients would email the account manager or the Director (myself) and then we would spend amazing amounts of time cc'ing the right people. We were looking for a program whereby the email trail for a client was easily accessible to all relevant staff. Karbon has sufficient security to ensure its not open sharing, but allowed us to much better service client needs across our growing team.

The Kanban/Task Management didn't work well for our company and the way we operate - I think it might work well for many accounting firms in vertical stacks, but we operate on a tier based level and it made using the task management system in Karbon a complex nightmare. Staff became confused with assigning and allocating work tags. We use a different program for project/task management - but it synchronises broadly with Karbon - and we intergrated Karbon with T-Sheets to take care of time monitoring.

It's very simple to get your head around in the main and comes with a good set of instructions. Love the task list and kanban boards for work management and as a practice manager, it makes my life much easier to be able to see all the work that is happening from one system. It also works wonders with repeating work items where you are able to assign e-mails or notes to multiple timelines and even...

Read more

We have found it harder to get older members of the team onto the software and potentially could have a very simple addon for programs such as outlook and gmail which would let users use the system they're used of but still push the information into Karbon correctly. There has also been issues a few times with integration to Office 365 which when the whole office relies on the system can be a big hit on productivity. The other thing I probably would change if possible is the client portal and make it much more of a place where clients can actually log in and see the progress of their work and get an idea on exactly what is being sorted for them.

Our staff enjoys the Triage function and visibility of communication most about Karbon. With having a team approach to most of our client work, it's important for everyone to know details from client interactions. This has helped us to be more efficient, batching questions and keeping us from contacting the client repeatedly for the same thing. It has essentially helped us provide better customer service while making our team more efficient.

I would like to have more options of labeling clients, helping to narrow down a specific group of clients to target for an email message or reporting purposes. Filter work by work title instead of work type.

I like the fact that this software gives me visibility on Work that is not complete, by person, by budget, by client, by type of work. The flexibility of seeing reporting is great.

The ability to search emails needs improvement. You can do it, however it is more effective to use Outlook.