Timer (Time & Budgets), and more!


Originally from June 14, 2021 

Today we are releasing another highly-requested feature to make tracking time quicker, easier, more intuitive, and give you one less reason to navigate away from Karbon. 

Timer

You now have the ability to track your time within Karbon and record it against the relevant work item or contact.

From any area of Karbon you can use the timer icon to track time. Karbon will automatically detect what you are working on and suggest the work item or contact to record against.

When you stop the timer, smart notes are automatically added based on the activities you have carried out during that time. You can edit these, or add your own notes for more detail.

To help avoid scope creep, you will be notified if your time gets close to the remaining budget allocated for that work item or contact.

Keyboard shortcuts

From anywhere in Karbon (when outside of a text input field), you can begin the timer by pressing Alt (Windows) or Option (Mac) ahead of T (Alt/Option + T).

And to enter a manual time entry, you can press Alt (Windows) or Option (Mac), then Control ahead of T (Alt/Option + Control + T).

Check out Karbon's other keyboard shortcuts here.

Template list update

Your Templates view has been re-designed, making it easier to track and manage your saved workflows. This is particularly important if you have a large and growing template collection.

Updates include:

  • A more compact view to display more templates on your screen

  • The ability to view and sort your templates by name, last published by, date added, last edited, or times used

  • A link to browse and add templates from the Karbon Template Marketplace

  • The option to create work directly from a work template's options menu (...)

Other updates

  • Time data exports now include a column for 'Fee type'

  • You can now click and navigate to an organization contact from the header of any linked person contacts

 

 

To the comments! Which is more exciting for you, automated smart notes or scope creep notifications? 

I’m curious if there is a way to get time from Karbon into QBO without using QB Time.  Intuit has made a mess of my account and say they can’t undo it so it won’t let me connect Karbon>QBTime>QBO and we need to for billing.  Also curious if billable/non-billable designation is on the roadmap for dev in Karbon time entry? @Ian Vacin 


I’m curious if there is a way to get time from Karbon into QBO without using QB Time.  Intuit has made a mess of my account and say they can’t undo it so it won’t let me connect Karbon>QBTime>QBO and we need to for billing.  Also curious if billable/non-billable designation is on the roadmap for dev in Karbon time entry? @Ian Vacin 

Hi Meghan,

You can designate billable/nonbillable in the task type! You can edit your task types in Settings>Workflow>Task Types. :slight_smile:

Jamie


We have tasks like say bookkeeping and for some clients on contract it’s not billable and for others it’s  billable.  Even for a contract client an bookkeeper can choose to bill work if it is out of scope.  Having the task type have a hard set for the task type doesn’t allow for any of that or for change and requires us to have Bookkeeping multiple times.  The bigger issue issue is that it’s hard coded in from the start which doesn’t work.  We use the task type to filter work for reports so we can see say all the sales tax or something.  We need billable v non-billable on our time not on the tasks.


I’m curious if there is a way to get time from Karbon into QBO without using QB Time.  Intuit has made a mess of my account and say they can’t undo it so it won’t let me connect Karbon>QBTime>QBO and we need to for billing.  Also curious if billable/non-billable designation is on the roadmap for dev in Karbon time entry? @Ian Vacin 

 

QB Time is currently required to pass this through. Currently.


We have tasks like say bookkeeping and for some clients on contract it’s not billable and for others it’s  billable.  Even for a contract client an bookkeeper can choose to bill work if it is out of scope.  Having the task type have a hard set for the task type doesn’t allow for any of that or for change and requires us to have Bookkeeping multiple times.  The bigger issue issue is that it’s hard coded in from the start which doesn’t work.  We use the task type to filter work for reports so we can see say all the sales tax or something.  We need billable v non-billable on our time not on the tasks.

 

Hi Meghan, great question, and thanks @Jamie Jorgenstone for a great suggestion! I hope others will share how they approach this as well.

 

Just some quick perspective on how the Time & Budgets feature is built that might help you look at it differently. Time entries and budgets/tasks are not actually hard-linked together. There’s not a one-to-one relationship between a time entry and a specific task you are working on. Instead, time entries get captured, and based on the contact/work they are tagged to, they become available for reporting against the budgets on that contact/work item. Fields like task type are really just to help achieve more granular reporting. 

 

So, the idea of how the feature was designed is that you could track time without any input/knowledge of how the billing side of things would play out. You’re just tracking time. Separately, if someone wanted to take a budgeted task on a work and decide to toggle it to a non-billable type, or perhaps adjust the billing rate to $0, they can do so without needing to change the time entries.

 

This should start to take shape better as additional features related to billing are released - stay tuned to our Product Roadmap webinars! And, until then, make sure you’ve talked to your account manager about the special billing report they can run for you on the backend. 


We have tasks like say bookkeeping and for some clients on contract it’s not billable and for others it’s  billable.  Even for a contract client an bookkeeper can choose to bill work if it is out of scope.  Having the task type have a hard set for the task type doesn’t allow for any of that or for change and requires us to have Bookkeeping multiple times.  The bigger issue issue is that it’s hard coded in from the start which doesn’t work.  We use the task type to filter work for reports so we can see say all the sales tax or something.  We need billable v non-billable on our time not on the tasks.

I am not sure if this is a suitable solution for you, but our firm has decided to designate only the following two task types: billable and non-billable.

For us, the “role” field is informative enough that we don’t really need to get more granular with the task type. It is actually giving us the opportunity to have people really think about what “role” they are playing at the time, even if it does not align with their job title. For example, our preparers should be doing almost entirely tax prep work, while our production managers should be mostly reviewing. If a production manager is doing the tax prep, they will designate their role to be accountant for that time entry, even though their job title is still production manager. This is going to help us clarify job descriptions and keep people within the scope of their job description, which will hopefully increase our efficiency.

I got a bit off track there, but my point is that perhaps you could consider making your “roles” more specific and utilize the “task type” to designate billable vs non-billable.


Is there an ability to have multiple timers at once? Not all running at the same time but not requiring to close a timer before starting a new one.


Not at this time Mike. Just one at a time. In the near future we’re going to launch a new idea/feature sharing/request area here in Community and would love to have you pitch it then. I know one question our designers would want to explore is whether jumping back and forth between work is something you have to do because of the nature of your work, or if it’s a practice you’d love to stop doing if you had the means to focus on one thing, finish, and move on.


Hi Evan

I would love to say that I could choose to not go back and forth between work, but as a Partner in the firm and not a staff it is not a reality for me and is not in my opinion possible to avoid. For staff, they are able to do that most of the time though, just not for my role