How big is your accounting team?

  • 29 March 2022
  • 6 replies
  • 129 views

Userlevel 1

Curious how big your accounting team is? 

Are you Audit, Tax, CAS, or something else?

Why did you pick Karbon over competitors?


6 replies

Userlevel 7
Badge +19

Curious how big your accounting team is? 

11 Staff currently

Are you Audit, Tax, CAS, or something else?

What is CAS? We mostly work with transportation and construction companies that need specific financial statements for banks or bonding companies. We are actively trying to grow the bookkeeping side of our business into a small business financial and operations consulting company to help small and medium-sized businesses harness the tools and management concepts that lead to growth and longevity.

Why did you pick Karbon over competitors?

We chose Karbon because it displayed work in kanban and has (nearly) friction-less client portal experience. The client portal is easier for our clients, and the workflow system allows us to more easily implement lean management systems into our work.

Does that answer your questions? I’m curious to read what other people have to say.

EDIT: Copied from direct message conversation:

Hi K.C, I'm glad you're considering making the move. 😀
I was the sole driver behind our change from OfficeTools to Karbon. Karbon lacked some of the basic functions that we used in OfficeTools (time and billing, email templates, document lists), but the focus on workflow was far superior, and the client experience was much better.

The ability to add email to work items and then share email across the team has been invaluable. We had so many problems before where clients would email the partner information while another staff member is hammering that same client with document request emails and phone calls. The continuity of communication is incredibly valuable.

We have people that do not fully utilize Triage, and we are working through that, but about half of our team didn't have any issue completely switching to Karbon for email. It's 100% a mindset issue, not an operational one. Does that make sense?

We considered many other software approaches.

  • Practice CS/Onvio - Decided not to go with it because there was no built-in kanban. It was all task and deadline-based instead of workflow-based.
  • TaxDome - You could not book time to a work item at the time, only at the client level. They are in rapid development and I really liked a lot of their features, but they seemed like an outfit that was trying to pack as many features into a project management software as possible. I thought they also took an arrogant approach in their marketing material, which I didn't like. Overall, I think they could be a pretty good system once it matures.
  • OfficeTools - I cannot say anything good about their system.
  • NetSuite/SAP/A few other ERP providers - They require a long-term commitment after a demo without the ability to test the software in the wild with clients. This is a strict barrier to entry for us as we like to start small and iterate a new system over our entire workflow.
  • Trello/MS Project/Other home-grown options - I started looking at building my own system from different cloud tools that would allow me the flexibility to move our company in the direction I wanted. This is a lot of work and I don't recommend it as any one of the systems could change how they work and not work together with other systems the way I wanted.

What I didn't say in my post, which I might go back and edit in, is that there are several key items that keep us with Karbon:

  • Unrivaled customer support - I get the answer I need very quickly. It was a terrible experience with OfficeTools
  • A dedication to building a product that customers want to use. This doesn't always mean that all customer feature requests get accepted, but Karbon truly listens and adjusts based on customer feedback as you can hopefully see here in the community, specifically in the feature ideas section.
  • Continuous development - Karbon is working towards shaking up the accounting industry, so they have a mission. they are not just out to make money... they are out to make a change and make money along the way.

Does that help at all?

Would it be okay if I posted these answers to the public comments on your post?

 

Userlevel 1

Thanks for responding! CAS = Client Advisory Services, or CAAS = Client Accounting and Advisory Services - any bookkeeping, accounting, advisory, consulting type work.

Userlevel 6
Badge +10

@K.C. Eames 

We are a firm of 9.

We provide Tax and CAS/CAAS services.

We chose Karbon for several reasons:

  • Triage and the @mentions/comments
  • Their technology and commitment to continually improving their platform, including an open API
  • Web-based
  • Visibility of workload across the team - best customization we saw
  • Data is not held hostage within a platform - ie - can export all data with ease for the most part to Excel
  • Top notch customer service
  • Ability to easily customize work for specific processes and for clients
  • Create work templates of our own, but also have access to a free template library as well

I could keep going.  We migrated out of CCH Axcess Workstream and Practice and into Karbon in 2020 and it was one of the best system conversions and training experiences we have had!

 

Hope this helps!

Userlevel 7
Badge +19

We converted to Karbon through last year’s tax season. There were some challenges, but I highly recommend the approach we took. I can provide more details if anyone is interested. Perhaps it should be it’s own thread.

Firm of 350 employees.  Evaluating whether Karbon is a good option for us.

Userlevel 7
Badge +15

Firm of 350 employees.  Evaluating whether Karbon is a good option for us.

What did you decide @Don Needs? (If you’re still here, lol)

Curious how big your accounting team is? 

Firm of 12, all using Karbon, make up as follows:

Principal (1), Senior Manager (1), Manager (1), Senior Accountant (1), Accountant (4), Senior Bookkeeper (1), Bookkeeper (2), Admin (1)

Are you Audit, Tax, CAS, or something else?

Tax and CAS/CAAS

Why did you pick Karbon over competitors?

When I started 4 years ago the firm was 18 months old and using Outlook, XPM and SuiteFiles, and trialling Karbon.

I didn’t know any competitors and tried to use only Karbon (avoid Outlook except for Calendar) and I didn’t have a good experience with SuiteFiles, so I used SharePoint.

We soon were all trying to use Karbon, then we invested time into templates and the more we used and setup our Karbon instance, the more we needed and wanted to. For about 2.5 years we’ve been 100% Karbon users.

I still don’t know any competitors well 😅

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