Question

Our Next Phase of Karbon - KPIs, Ad Hoc Assignments and QuickBooks Time

  • 4 April 2022
  • 3 replies
  • 383 views

Userlevel 1

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. 

 


3 replies

Userlevel 7
Badge +19

 Hi @Adam Kusnierek! I’ll work through your questions and give you a reflection of how we’ve worked trough this in our firm. I cannot say that these are “answers” as any solution will be highly dependent on your particular situation.

How many people in your firm?

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 love using the work dashboards to monitor workflow. Kanban is one of the main reasons I chose Karbon in the first place, but grew to be only one of the many reasons I am sticking with it.

We have a basic rule that if work requires confirmation from a client, two or more people’s input at the firm, or any kind of follow-up, it goes into a work item for the relevant department and is handled similar to the rest of the work (first in, first out with exceptions for urgency).

We preach a model for respectful communication where the more urgent the matter, the more active the mode of communication we should use:

Conversely, we respond to received communication in the same manner such that if we receive a phone call, we treat it as urgent out of respect for the person making the phone call.

Most of our phone calls are not complicated, so they go in as notes to the appropriate person, which get handled quickly in most cases because of the model we have been using.

One thing you could consider is approaching your situation from both angles, as an operational one (calls as work with dashboard) and as a cultural one (preach a communication model similar to what I have shown above).

I’ve also considered external dashboard software, and linking this with Karbon - Has anyone gone down this road?

I’m using the API to pull in time information from Karbon on-demand. I have not fully fleshed this out, but you can see my other posts about it if you are interested:

We are highly focused on a lean management approach to our work, diligently applying first in, first out work flow, and trying our best to get our staff to finish work before starting new work.

Here’s a video that really helped me get the idea across to my staff:

So, what this means for us is that the main KPI I track is TAKT time (the average amount of time it takes any one person in a process to complete their step).

Here’s a video that does a pretty good job of explaining it:

I am in the process of building a dashboard in Excel that will calculate our TAKT time and actual times by role in our process and their standard deviations. For example, we have a specif work item that must be completed between Jan 1 and Apr 15 each year. Our process has four stations:

  1. Pre-preparation (collecting documents, scanning, filing, confirming, etc.)
  2. Preparation
  3. Review
  4. Processing (getting signatures and filing tax returns)

The longest step in our process is no. 2, Preparation, at an average of 102 minutes. Our TAKT time is around 80 minutes. We use these KPIs to tell us that we need more help in Prep either to reduce our one staff members time to below 80 minutes through more training, or by adding additional staff.

 

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).

We had QBT and Karbon linked and it was terrible for many reasons. The only things I like about QBT are the timer and seeing who’s clocked in to what work.

The problem with QBT is that everything must be perfect from Karbon <> QBT <> QBO. If there are any mismatches, one upper case letter out of place, one L.L.C. instead of LLC, and it throws errors that need to be manually fixed.

There’s also another issue: If you get a duplicate, Murphy’s law worked out for us such that QBT always linked up to the wrong client in QBO and there’s basically no way to fix it short of deleting everything and starting over.

I would never recommend someone connect Karbon to QBT. 😕

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?

I think for some of the reasons  listed above, Karbon is developing their own time and billing module, which looks promising. My recommendation would be to keep things as you have them and evaluate Karbon’s time and billing module when it’s released.

Check out the product update post here:

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?

By assignment do you mean a work item or a task within a work item? From what I have seen, there will not be a way to block staff from entering time, but when the billing module launches, it will show what time entries have been billed and which are unbilled.

We have a rule in our firm that once work is ‘Completed’ status, it can never be re-opened or have time added to it. If we need to do more work, we launch a rework work item (this also helps track rework situations)

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?

Each work item must be manually archived or marked as inactive either in QBT or QBO. We have weekly work cycles and quickly learned that it was an unmanageable process. We ended up booking time at the client level, only, which is not ideal and one of the reasons we switched to Karbon time. We built a home-grown billing spreadsheet that pulls time out of Karbon and builds a QBO invoice import sheet.

 

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. 

 

Good luck on your Karbon journey! 😀 For our firm, the benefits we gained in client better client interactions and workflow organization far outweighed the tradeoffs you’re highlighting here.

Is that helpful at all?

Userlevel 1

@max Thank you very much for such a comprehensive response. A lot for us to think about here, particularly the QuickBooks time point - We will need to reconsider this approach. 

Userlevel 7
Badge +19

Everyone’s situation is different, so QBT may work for you. It was a terrible experience for us, lol.

I’m sure there are people here who use it with success. I’d be curious to read when they have to say.

Reply