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I am curious to know what others are doing in terms of setting up recurring payroll work in Karbon for payroll services provided to clients (i.e. collecting hours and then inputting and processing payroll for them).

Currently we have the Payroll Work item assigned to a specific team member so every 2 weeks the client gets an automated client request from Karbon to submit their hours to us so we can process their payroll (we mainly use Wagepoint here in Canada) which would come from a specific team member.  However, we were hoping to implement more of an “Payroll Team” approach where the hours come in from the client to a shared “payroll@...” email address.  The first available preparer can then process the payroll and mark the preparation stage off as complete so the work then flows to a designated reviewer.  The benefit of the team approach also ensures that when a team member is away we don’t have go searching through their timeline for the hours as well (sometimes a client will email hours directly to a team member instead of replying via the Karbon work item...makes hours sometimes harder to locate).

However, I do not believe this is currently possible in Karbon as you can’t assign work to a general “payroll@...” email address (must be a user)?

I’ve considered creating a separate user in Karbon using “payroll@” and then setting up a shared triage - however, I don’t think this is possible either since you can’t create a shared triage with an account account user email address?  

Curious to know what process others are using where they provide recurring payroll services to clients.

Thanks for your input.

Mike

 

I’m also curious.


I think there’s a couple things you could look at that might help:

  • Be stricter about holding clients accountable to your processes, i.e. “we require all hours to be submitted through the task. This ensures the information is organized appropriately and reduces delays or information going missing” or something - that will reduce instances where it is difficult to find information.
  • Create a “dummy” user in Karbon and don’t accept the invite (so you aren’t charged). Work can be assigned to this user so it can go in a “queue”.
    • Either work could create automatically with this user, or reassign to this user when a client ticks off the task using automators
    • Client tasks couldn’t be sent from this user though, so you would still need to use “Client Owner” or “Other Colleague” when setting up automated task sending
  • Create a full email account for payroll@company in your email system and set them up as a paid Karbon account so you can send tasks from them.
    • You could then either give everyone in your payroll team the login details to manage that Karbon account, or have a specific person responsible for Triaging the account
    • It would come with the extra cost, but you may decide the extra monthly charge is worth the efficiency of a central user account

I would encourage some behaviour management with regards to clients only submitting changes/hours etc. using the Karbon tasks whatever solution you come up with! It just keeps everything so much more organized and clean, and means automators can be used more effectively.


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