Question

How are you managing internal supplier correspondence?

  • 26 October 2021
  • 5 replies
  • 63 views

Userlevel 2
Badge +2

We have set up a few internal clients such as ‘Evolve HR’ and ‘Evolve Software’ then we have work items named such as ‘John Smith Annual Review’ (for adding notes through the year) and ‘Xero’ (for general correspondence with our account manager, for example).

 

For things such as a stationery supplier, is it worth having a ‘Evolve Suppliers’ contact with each listed and tagging in the work item for that supplier or area of the business (e.g. stationery), or are you relying heavily on the search function and simply clearing these emails (e.g. a order confirmation email)? I’ve heard the search function has changed recently and perhaps isn’t as useful as the last search function.

 

We’re very new to Karbon and don’t want to create work for the sake of it! Guidance appreciated on how your admin department are working this. I’m finding internal work isn’t as straight forward as the client work so am trying to guide our highly organised Practice Administrator as best as possible!

 

Many thanks

Emily


5 replies

Userlevel 7
Badge +19

Hi Emily! Congratulations on joining the Karbon world. :)

We have a strict rule in our firm (that gets broken from time to time…) that if we expect staff to take an action, it’s tracked in either a to-do or work item in Karbon. We have all staff training, internal work items, continuing education, and recurring administrative tasks as work in Karbon.

We also try to add contacts when possible so that we can take advantage of the timelines feature and pickup a conversation where another staff member left off if they get promoted or switch roles.

We even use client tasks to communicate with our internal vendors, like IT, when we ask them to setup an on-boarding staff member.

We don’t do it perfectly, but the internal work you do for your firm is likely as important as the external work, so my recommendation would be to treat it in a similar way.

Does that help at all?

Userlevel 2
Badge +2

Hi Emily! Congratulations on joining the Karbon world. :)

We have a strict rule in our firm (that gets broken from time to time…) that if we expect staff to take an action, it’s tracked in either a to-do or work item in Karbon. We have all staff training, internal work items, continuing education, and recurring administrative tasks as work in Karbon.

We also try to add contacts when possible so that we can take advantage of the timelines feature and pickup a conversation where another staff member left off if they get promoted or switch roles.

We even use client tasks to communicate with our internal vendors, like IT, when we ask them to setup an on-boarding staff member.

We don’t do it perfectly, but the internal work you do for your firm is likely as important as the external work, so my recommendation would be to treat it in a similar way.

Does that help at all?

Really helpful - thanks Max!

Userlevel 7
Badge +13

We have a contact type for vendors and add them all to Karbon.  This way we can tag the emails to the contact.  We also add their function to their name to help with searches.  So our insurance contact would be  John Smith (Insurance Agent).  This really helps with the search function.  You can go to contacts, filter to see only Vendors and then search “insurance”.  Any vendor contact with the word insurance will come up.  This really helps if you forget the company or person’s name.

We also do this for Referral Contacts.  We have a few contacts we keep that are for specific services we don’t provide.  If a client needs something like a 1031 Exchange or Estate Planning, we can again search in referrals for the type of service needed even if we can’t remember their name.  So we name them Jane Doe (1031 Exchange )  Or Jessica Smith (Estate Planning).

We have found adding (  ) descriptors after names really helps with searches for vendors, referrals, and other professionals we have in our system, but are not clients.

Userlevel 2
Badge +2

Thanks @DianeK I love this idea!

Userlevel 7
Badge +19

I like the idea of using the brackets. It would be nice if there was a way to enter data that didn’t get pulled across when we use the Karbon placeholders in emails.

I also wonder which fields are included in the search.

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