Hi All
I wanted to get the community’s help with our next phase of Karbon implementation. We have been using Karbon for just over a year now, and it has provided enormous benefits to our work organisation. Until now, we have used Karbon as a hub for all our work, and a place for team members to organise their own weekly tasks, however we are now getting to the stage where we want to advance our use of the software as we feel we could get much more from it.
The main areas we are looking at are KPIs and time.
We currently calculate KPIs manually, and report these in an excel file on a monthly basis. The process of gathering these is a little clunky to say the least.
In terms of time, we currently use QuickBooks Time, but are yet to link through to Karbon.
I’ve put my questions below, and am keen to hear how everyone else uses Karbon in these areas, so please share any thoughts and tips you think we may find useful as we transition into this next stage.
KPIs
I know we can utilise the Insights screen to obtain information such as average turnaround times, and individual team member statistics, so this is something we will look into. I’m also keen to try wherever possible, to utilise the work boards for our other KPIs. We are trying to monitor call and paper correspondence response times and find this tricky. We use tasks and notes in Karbon to assign these to team members, so it is hard to generate a report showing how long it takes a team member to close these down.
We are considering moving all correspondence that requires an action, and calls that come in to the office, to a template work assignment instead. This way we could create a work board, filtered for a new ‘Correspondence/Call’ work type, and this will show all current and closed assigments, and detail whether these are on track or overdue. We would then also be able to utilise insights to provide average turnaround times etc for this specific new work type.
My question is therefore, has anyone adopted the same approach as this, or other approaches that work for minotoring these KPIs, and are there any other useful KPIs that you monitor within Karbon that we should consider?
I’ve also considered external dashboard software, and linking this with Karbon - Has anyone gone down this road?
Time/QuickBooks Time
We currently use QuickBooks time, and this is set up with custom fields, so a team member will select the client name, the assignment (i.e. accounts), the year, and whether the time is billable. This currently doesn’t integrate with Karbon.
We are looking to link to two together and bring our individual assignment budgets, (currently maintained in excel), into the time and budget screen for each client, giving us a higher level or reporting that we can utilise in Karbon.
We would intend for our team to continue recoding time within QuickBooks time, as the timer in QuickBooks time is a little bit better in our opinion, tracking the exact time an individual clocks in and out. This will of course automatically flow into Karbon against the relevant budgets.
We had a few questions on this link up. Firstly, should we get rid of our ‘old’ custom fields in QuickBooks time. When a team member now selects their time in QuickBooks time, they will directly select the appropriate assignment, which negates the need to have custom fields for year, job type and chargeable (This is all covered by the Karbon assignment going forward).
Second, for those who run both softwares side by side in this nature, where do you approve and lock the timesheets, in Karbon or QuickBooks time?
Third, ideally we would like team members to be blocked from posting time to an assignment once the Karbon assignment is completed or closed. It doesn’t seem to automatically do this from some initial testing - Does anyone have a solution to this?
Lastly, I believe that the assignments in QuickBooks time, will continue to grow for each iteration of the assignment. I.e. every month when we generate a new payroll assignment, the list of assignments in QuickBooks time for a team member to select from will grow. I suspect this list could get very long and a nuisance for the team - Again does anyone have a solution for this, perhaps something that may also address my previous question?
I appreciate this is an enormous post so if you’ve made it all the way down to the bottom thank you! If you have any thoughts on any of the above please let me know - Any help is greatly appreciated.