Hey everyone - Our firm has been with Karbon for about 2 years and we are retooling some of our processes as well as work items as we’ve grown and we are looking for some insight into some best practices when it comes to our Bookkeeping work items.
For the majority of our client base, we do quarterly financials - very rarely do we have monthly calls with monthly financials. We want to have the work done monthly so workflow is more predictable on a monthly basis as currently most work items are just set up for quarterly write up and then a financial statement prep in the same work item with multiple steps.
We have thought of three ways to get this done while trying to cause the least confusion.
Option 1 - Create a monthly repeating bookkeeping work item that just has reconciliation work and then create a separate repeating work item for quarterly financial statement prep. In the quarterly financial statement prep, the first step would be for the bookkeeper to check off that all 3 months are reconciled so that work is not going to the accountant before it is actually ready.
Option 2 - Create 12 Bookkeeping work items for each client that don’t repeat and on the month that the quarter ends, have the tasks associated with quarterly financial statement prep, tax planning, etc get added into those work items, and then in the 12th month, add completing the entity tax return into the work item.
Option 3 - Create one work item that spans the entire year and just have each month be a task within the work item.
Each of these options have their own lists of pros and cons ranging from work visibility to complications with automaters, to issues with clients not providing proper information, to having a timeline overload in one work item. Also don’t know if we are overthinking this. I wanted to get an idea of how others are handling this inside of Karbon to get an idea of what may work best. Any insight anyone could provide would be very much appreciated.