Hi @CBC-Office, that’s a great question. We have a similar situation with one of our clients where we get emails and need to take action on them.
How we handle it is by “Completing” the email with a note. This way, I know all emails in the timeline without a note have not been handled. All emails with a note have been handled (work complete or added to MyWeek if some kind of follow-up was needed).
I haven’t found a better way to handle this type of situation, so I’m curious what others have to say.
Hi @CBC-Office
If there were a lot of emails coming in that need to be actioned we break the work into weekly work orders, assigning the email to the work order for the week that it came in - this will make the timeline a little more manageable.
We comment on the email when it has been actioned in the same way @max noted.
The work order where all of these emails are parked does not get marked complete until all emails have been actioned or tagged into the next week if action could not happen.
The work shows up in My Week as one item, My Week doesn’t get cluttered with emails unless there is additional assigning/action where it might make sense to do that.
Not sure if that would work for you…
Also, if emails are being forwarded to accounting platforms have you looked into Hubdoc - especially since you are in Xero.
@CBC-Office can your clients send their bills/invoices directly to Xero/MYOB to cut out the middle step?
Even though To-Do will be deactivated, it will be replaced with an Assignments feature which will have some similarities. In particular, you will be able to see Emails/Notes that you have assigned to others, and also be able to choose a colleague and see all Emails/Notes assigned to them.
For the few clients we have where we do something similar, we’ve set them up with an email account at our domain that they forward the emails to. The bookkeeping team then log in directly to that account (outside of Karbon) and forward the emails from there, and archive them once that’s done. It helps keep Karbon free of this noise. I can appreciate though that it could get costly if you were to do this for every client if you have to pay per email account!
Thanks @max and @Victoria Peters for your processes on this. We will also comment on emails when sent to file & then when completed/entered etc. But this does get very time consuming with having to scroll back to the email through the timeline to find the specific invoice after it is sent.
Interesting idea @Victoria Peters with splitting monthly work into weekly chunks for just the emails. This might work for some of our clients, but others have too much that even looking at each of the weekly breakdowns would be a lot.
@Rebecca Williams Is there anywhere that goes into depth for the Assignments feature? Wondering if some tweaking of processes in this could help at least discover if anything had been missed.
As for the clients forwarding direct to the file, some do & at times we have found that they will try to forward without an attatchment & we need to go back to them. Or that they forget to do this before we look at their work, and we need to remind them before we can start after we have logged into their file. Having things come into Karbon helps us have a overview of what work we have before we even log into the file to start. And individual emails is a very costly work around.
I wondering if even showing in the Work’s Timeline view who the email/note is assigned to & a little tag or similar to show it’s status when colapsed could help? Would at least potentially limit some of the multiple touch points it takes to add comments.
@CBC-Office if you message your Karbon client success rep they should be able to give you a demo! I believe there is also a product roadmap happening in April so hopefully it will be covered in that.
I feel you with the inconsistent client behaviour though - it’s also something we struggle with! Client tasks help us with this - most of our clients get a “start of work” checklist that automatically goes out, and in this checklist they need to confirm they have uploaded all their docs into Dext. We don’t start their work until they’ve checked off this task.
Another thing that I think would help (I can’t recall if there’s an existing feature request) is being able to filter a timeline by status, so we could exclude Completed notes/emails!
@Rebecca Williams Filtering timeline by status would be amazing!