Karbon

Avantages

Karbon AI, workflow, Triage, integration with the tax software and best customer service.

Inconvénients

Setting up templates can be quite cumbersome.

Avantages

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.

Inconvénients

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

Alternatives envisagées 

Pourquoi choisir Karbon 

Pourquoi passer à Karbon

Avantages

This is not a review of the product function - I couldn't get it to function with Google Workspace, even with their technical help. Technically, it probably does work if you can figure it out, but I'm not that person.

Inconvénients

Customer service. There's NO way to cancel your subscription if you change your mind. I had to ask them to cancel it through their chat, and then they refused to stop debiting my card until I told them why I was canceling (which I already had made quite clear - I'm not techy enough to work with it.) But no, they wanted me to repeat all that, probably to a "retention" person, which I had no time to do at the time. So they kept charging the next month. So, now I'm asking my bank to change my card and leaving a one star review, because at least THAT will work.

Avantages

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!

Inconvénients

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!

Alternatives envisagées 

Pourquoi passer à Karbon

Avantages

Karbon support was great in helping get us set up and understand how to use the product. From there, your imagination is the limit of Karbon. You may not even need that with all the helpful tools and templates they have!

Inconvénients

It could do better about helping report on capacity. They have a new feature, but costs extra too.

Avantages

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.

Inconvénients

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 if they have not done the work. I want automatic feedback on this.
I want more shortcut icons. Some steps are really "clicky"
I wish there was much better app integration. This is very limited.
On a task list, if a task does not apply to a client I want to mark it NA. Not delete it or mark it complete with a comment.
I need more flexibility on labeling clients. For example I want a job to be flagged as extended and not just have a temporary status of completed.

Alternatives envisagées 

Pourquoi choisir Karbon 

Pourquoi passer à Karbon

Avantages

Karbon is great for keeping task in order in your "my week" tab. easy to see what needs to be worked on this week and then puts the rest into the prompted categories. Triage is also great for emails and assigning tasks to co workers from an email thread. Also being able to link emails to the clients contact. You can also request documents from a client on the work item. AI feature also allows you to get a bot of a tax return results in email form for the client.

Inconvénients

Sometimes you can type in the exact name of a contact and they will still pull up a whole list of contacts. Also that it talks with other systems but if you don't do it in a certain order it will created two work items for one contact.

Avantages

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

Inconvénients

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

Avantages

Workflow functionality is great. Resource planning workbook is great.

Inconvénients

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.

Avantages

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.

Inconvénients

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.

Avantages

Great features and helps manage your workflow well. Ability to send links to clients to download files

Inconvénients

There is too much clutter with the email settings functionality

Avantages

Easy to get started. The community is amazing - lots of people willing to help you. Really good knowledge base articles!

Inconvénients

ha! I haven't found anything I don't like!

Avantages

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.

Inconvénients

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.

Avantages

Triage has eased the pain of dealing with the ever growing problem and distractions of managing emails. Digital communication with the customer and team members is smooth and easy. Workflow management and process templates has been a real game changer!

Inconvénients

Can’t think of any Cons… I feel this is a good thing. 😉

Avantages

It's impossible to grow a firm without making intrinsic knowledge available to all. Karbon has allowed us to codify that knowledge in templates and checklists, while making both internal and client communications visible across the team.

Inconvénients

I'm looking forward to improved integration with our file storage system, as clients tend to want to upload documents through Karbon but that's not where I want them.

Avantages

The transparency of tasks, work, emails, etc across the team is amazing

Inconvénients

It is quite expensive without many options to reduce fees

Avantages

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.

Inconvénients

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.

Avantages

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!

Inconvénients

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!!!

Avantages

The email feature is very good. It enables a remote team to pick up things even if the email was sent to someone else

Inconvénients

Flexibility of changing the templates e.g. attaching a pdf file

Avantages

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" feature that includes auto-reminders! Our team acclimated to Karbon rather quickly and they continue get excited when learning about new features.

I do need to mention that the customer support is excellent! Our questions/needs are responded to almost immediately. Lastly, Karbon is continually adding features and listening to what their customers are asking for...and it shows with their updates that are frequently being communicated.

In short...WE LOVE KARBON

Inconvénients

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.

Avantages

TRIAGE - LOVE IT! you only read an email once, action it (assign to yourself, someone else, respond or create work), none of this reviewing the same emails as you constantly try to clear your inbox. You then work out of your TO-DO list and you even get the satisfaction of ticking items off the list
The TRIAGE and TO-DO list help your own personal workflow/daily schedule but the "work" in Karbon is so easy to see at a glance what everyone is up to. We had someone really sick for a week and in the click of a button we reallocated the work, and all the correspondence with the client was attached.

Inconvénients

Not really a "con" just an area to continue to improve - Emailing out of the triage is good, and they keep adding features, but it doesn't have all features of gmail etc it works well for most, but the attachment limit can catch you off guard sometimes but i know they are increasing the attachment size.

Avantages

WIth Karbon I am finally able to effectively delegate work and control execution. Standardize work processes and customize when necessary.

Inconvénients

More expensive as other solutions. However, I tried multiple and Karbon is by far the best and worth the price.

Avantages

The best thing about Karbon is that it integrates with your email!

Inconvénients

It is very overwhelming when you first start only because it has so many features and options, but their implementation team is awesome and very helpful!

Avantages

Allows for a highly organized system for all facets of your business. Having the ability to delegate and assign work, check on the progress of each task by creating checklists, and have your email filtered in so that nothing is overlooked has been immensely helpful to our business.

Inconvénients

I suppose depending on the size of your team, it can get expensive, however I do believe the benefit and time savings would outweigh the cost. I would also like to see a better notification system when checklists have items left unchecked for more than the duration of the job post. This would help prevent steps being overlooked or ignored.

Avantages

The availability of necessary data for an accounting work is the greatest advantage of this software; e-mails, clients, project managements, etc., it all available in Karbon. It can filter inputs and data of my entire team which makes allocation of files easier and time-saving. Visibility of necessary facts is top-notch. With this software, monitoring of deadlines and schedule reminders is easy and automated.

Inconvénients

Limited integration is a disadvantage. Since our team uses more than one software for our daily accounting needs, it would really be a great addition for integration with excel or QuickBooks. But this might be included in future updates which we will gladly be looking forward to.