Time & Budgets

I’m also working to move from T-Sheets to Karbon-only time and billing, so I’m curious to hear what others suggest.

We are also a fixed fee firm considering implementing Time & Budgets for internal capacity planning as well as analyzing profitability of jobs. When you say you converted from Tsheets to Karbon, do you mean that you’ve integrated Tsheets and Karbon and now use Karbon’s in-app time tracking features? Or is there a way to move away from Tsheets completely and just use Karbon (i.e. no integration)?

The major challenge that we are facing with Time & Budgets is that we deal almost exclusively in groups - we have a single engagement (fixed fee) that covers a group of businesses, as well as their individual owners. Karbon’s client group feature has been a game-changer in tracking our projects and managing these groups of clients. Unfortunately, the time tracked at the group-member level (a specific client) doesn’t roll up into the client group. This makes it impossible for us to efficiently use Time & Budgets for useful analysis.

We thought we could overcome the challenge by choosing to track time only against our client group contacts, and not against individual work items. But we’ve come to realize that you can’t set budgets at the contact level, only at the work item level. So we would lose the budgeting functionality completely by doing it that way.

We are now considering making it a policy to assign ALL work items to the client group, but that is kind of a clunky work around that doesn’t always make sense, and will add some unnecessary complexity to tracking work.

I’m curious if anyone has any idea on the best practice here? Or if anyone is facing similar challenge? It feel like there should be a better way. 

I am very interested in the thread as well, we price using fixed fees.

Can I ask are you tracking time for payroll or just for capacity planning?

We have made a big deal of not asking our staff to track their time, all are on annual salary so we hold them accountable to objectives not time (the objectives are around quality, on time deliverables, contribution to revenue based on a charge out rate and productivity expectations - all results driven).  

There is sometimes a disconnect between the fee and the budget - we are working on the best way to reconcile that so we know if we need to change the fee, train the staff, change the process….

I will be watching this thread for your amazing and creative insights!

This is a really great thread with amazing insight from various firms. Agree with many of the responses for using Karbon T&B to grade realization and capacity resources utilized, not the billing/value metric. 

The move away from TSheets integration to Karbon in-app T&B was an easy one for us. Because your team is already on the work timeline to sign-off tasks, respond to emails/notes, etc the T&B tab is sitting right there for team to record time. All in one place!

The other truly amazing thing about Karbon in-app T&B, the "artificial intelligence" tracks all the work  timelines you took action on in a given day. So if your team prefers to record time at the end of their day, Karbon timesheet will give you suggested time entries based on the AI tracking of work timelines you took action on that day.

As Jamie said, we too desire to aggregate time data at the Group level for better realization and capacity planning for our client relationships. We use client groups to setup our client relationships. For example, John and Jane Doe is the root level relationship, setup as client group. We then add members to the group for all of John and Jane's business entities (setup as organizations). For example, maybe they have an operating entity, a real estate holding entity, and then a family trust entity. All of these are setup as organizations and nested as members under the Group.

It would be nice if you could aggregate time budget and actual time data to the client group level. This would allow for better capacity planning of time commitments our firm has committed to 1 relationship.

We moved from T-Sheets to Karbon when their timesheeting feature came out.

We record time at a job level, if there is one set up, because we want to know how much time we have spent at that level.

When we calculate our fixed fee, we look at a number of factors, one of which is the profit we want / need to make from the client for the year.  the only way to know this at a reasonably granular level is how much time is being spent on each of the jobs which make up the work to be performed for the client.

Also, we want to know if staff are taking too long on jobs so that we can identify training needs within our firm.

Hope that helps.

Hi Guys 

Do you know if there is a way to export a CSV file from each client to view total time by client

Thanking you all