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We’re exploring integrating Karbon and Ignition again. 

Is there anyone who has the integration enabled and would be able to answer some questions from a colleague? She’s got some questions about how it works with regards to budgets, billing and fixed fee vs. time and materials work.

Additionally, any best practices when integrating would be helpful! We’ve integrated before and weren’t diligent with contact names so caused lots of duplicates, and ended up disabling the integration. What else should we be aware of/limitations?

following! Would be interested in exploring integration.


I am also interested in hearing if anyone else has more experience with it.  On Friday, we connected the two for the first time, but only set it up so that upon signing in Ignition, certain services would trigger new Work being created for a client in Karbon.  That’s all we have done so far.  We figured out quickly that it would be easy create a bunch of duplicate contacts without consistent naming.


We have used the integration in the past but currently have it disabled. The main problem we ran into was renewal engagement letters in Ignition created work items in Karbon that we duplicates of work items already in place with a recurrence schedule. Deleting or canceling the duplicate work items became a real pain last year.

Other challenges on start/end dates, recurrence schedule is not automatic but what it does do is create the organization record if no matching records are found (name match) and create work from a template. It would be great if the match was based on a unique ID in both systems. Sometimes we had organizations duplicated due to inconsistent commas in XYC Company LLC and XYC Company, LLC.

Ignition service library can be mapped to Karbon work templates.

It would be great if ignition included a flag on each service line which would allow us to skip the Karbon integration if desired.

It would also be great if financial information would flow over, ex. monthly subscription price (ignition) to fixed fee on work item (karbon). 

More info:

https://support.ignitionapp.com/en/articles/2475755-ignition-and-karbon


@Rebecca Williams I use both applications, with limited integration.

  • Make sure to export your client list from Karbon and use this as the import list into Ignition. Any deviation in the name will result in duplicates being created. This step is extremely important.
  • Decide on the level of integration wanted / needed. The majority of our work is on a repeating schedule in Karbon so I decided the integration for Ignition services would default to not being mapped to Karbon work templates. There are specific Ignition services I do have mapped to Karbon. These are generally for either one off work items or services for new clients. The latter means we duplicate a service item in Ignition. For example, I have two (2) Ignition services for US Individual Income Tax returns. One is for use with existing clients and not mapped to a Karbon work template, and the other is for new clients and is mapped.
  • You mentioned Time/Billing/Fixed fee, etc.I use this in Karbon. Ignition does not have an impact on this outside of the Services which are mapped to a Karbon template. The default settings from Karbon would be applied and then I would have to revise based on the work item being created from Ignition.

Overall, I find it was important to sit back and determine how I wanted the two applications to work together to meet my goals and how I envisioned the two working together given the level of native integration allowed within each application.


Thanks for the comprehensive details @LD7E and @lbernstein!!

cc @Kiran Dash @Katrina Stevenson 


We currently have the integration between Karbon and Ignition. We utilize the connection to setup our work when we are engaging with a client. We have all of our services aligned with our work templates, each service item has a work template that is synced in Ignition. 

When a client accepts the proposal we use Zapier to look in Karbon to know whether it is an existing client or a new client. If it is an existing client the work is then created under that client. If it is a new client, the company and client information is added into Karbon. We have a “dummy” user in Karbon called “Work Assignee for Ignition” that all new work gets assigned to. 

We bill a fixed monthly fee to our clients. Our clients are auto-billed on the 1st of the month. We then have our budgets/actuals that we measure inside Karbon, these are setup on the work items and our team is clocking time in Karbon against the work items throughout the month. I review these using KPI weekly and monthly to ensure we are working within our budgets set.

We also bill for some services “as needed” we set these up when engaging with the client as a project and then we select “bill on completion”. When we need to do the work for the client, we pull the work forward in Karbon and have a step at the end of the work item to recreate the work template and for billing. We then go into Ignition and bill the time for these as-needed services. 

One thing to note regarding the mapping of work template in Ignition. If you change the name of the work template you will have to re-sync the mapping in Ignition!


Thanks @Ashley Rhoden - interesting that you use both Zapier and Ignition integrations.

Good point about the template names - we do change these occasionally so will need to keep that in mind!


I am able to customizerthe Ignition > Karbon sync if anyone is interested.
 

 There is more we can do as well it just all dependant on data sourcing.


@Automation n Stuff id like to learn more about the custom ignition sync. 


@lbernstein email me sales@automationnstuff.com and tell me a little bit about what you are looking to achieve and we can setup a time to go over together 👍


@Automation n Stuff Were you able to get this integrated on a continuous basis?


@bob swogland Sorry, not sure I understand the question?


Were you able to integrate Karbon with Ignition? 


@lbernstein were you able to integrate Ignition and Karbon?


@bob swogland Yes, I’ve done a couple different versions in fact. 1 uses a database, the other doesn’t.


We currently have the integration between Karbon and Ignition. We utilize the connection to setup our work when we are engaging with a client. We have all of our services aligned with our work templates, each service item has a work template that is synced in Ignition. 

When a client accepts the proposal we use Zapier to look in Karbon to know whether it is an existing client or a new client. If it is an existing client the work is then created under that client. If it is a new client, the company and client information is added into Karbon. We have a “dummy” user in Karbon called “Work Assignee for Ignition” that all new work gets assigned to. 

We bill a fixed monthly fee to our clients. Our clients are auto-billed on the 1st of the month. We then have our budgets/actuals that we measure inside Karbon, these are setup on the work items and our team is clocking time in Karbon against the work items throughout the month. I review these using KPI weekly and monthly to ensure we are working within our budgets set.

We also bill for some services “as needed” we set these up when engaging with the client as a project and then we select “bill on completion”. When we need to do the work for the client, we pull the work forward in Karbon and have a step at the end of the work item to recreate the work template and for billing. We then go into Ignition and bill the time for these as-needed services. 

One thing to note regarding the mapping of work template in Ignition. If you change the name of the work template you will have to re-sync the mapping in Ignition!

Thanks so much for this information Ashley. From reading this am I correct in understanding you dont bring the dollar value of the Ignition monthly fees into Karbon for WIP reporting and only use the budget to actual reporting in Karbon? How do you do revenue/realisation reporting in your firm if this is the case?


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