Recurring work deadlines, upfront payment details + KPI workbook update

Related products: Work Contacts Billing & Payments Client Communication Practice Intelligence

Add deadlines to repeat work

In case you missed it, the deadline beta feature was released in January and has been steadily improving with new functionality since then. With this week’s release, you can now add a deadline to any repeating work schedules.

Setting up deadlines on repeat work is similar to setting up due dates. Go to a work item, select Set Up Repeating Work > Key Dates > Deadline, and input the desired deadline schedule.

Please note that you can’t pick a specific date when setting up deadlines on repeating work. The drop-down options are driven by the work item’s start date.

If you have repeating work with specific statutory deadlines like annual tax filings, you can set it up using the instructions below.

The work deadlines feature will be released to all customers soon. The beta program is closed for new signups while the team prepares it for release. Another release note will be published when it is available to all.

 

Request client payment details up front

This highly requested feature has been added to Karbon Billing to further save you time on payment collection.

If you have billing access, you can request client payment details up front to ensure on-time, automatic payments on all future invoices.

To request payment details up front, go to Receivables > Client > Auto-Pay > Request Payment Method, or Contact > Billing > Auto-Pay > Request Payment Method. Your client will then receive an email with a secure link to input their payment details. Once their payment details are saved, all approved invoices will be automatically paid on their due date.

 

New billing tab on contacts

To enable a more cohesive billing experience and give you more convenience over where and how they interact with clients’ billing data, a new billing tab is added to People and Organization contacts.

Colleagues with billing access can go to the billing tab of a client’s profile and see the same information available in the receivables dashboard: a 12-month billing overview, auto-pay details, invoices, and billing activity.

You can also Request Payment Method in the billing tab to collect client payment details upfront for auto-payments of future invoices.

 

A redesigned KPI Time Workbook

Based on your feedback, the KPI TIme Workbook is completely revamped to give you more control, visibility, and insights into your team’s billable hours, utilization, and time entries.

The new Time Workbook is available in KPI today and you can get a quick overview of what’s new in this video.

 

Previous releases

If you missed an update, you can still see a list of what we released in Karbon. For API releases, see the Karbon Developer Center.

@Shaun Farrugia - it’s not something we had planned, but there are a few scenarios we know off where it could be useful. The most common seems to be US tax filing extensions, where the deadline date seems to move 6 months further out if a request for extension is filed.
Like @SamG says, the overwhelming feedback we’ve had is that the Deadline should be almost immovable - i.e. it’s a big deal if it moves and not something to do on a whim.

For what it’s worth, we don’t move the deadlines because even when they are extended, we want to treat them as due immediately. We’re trying hard this tax season to just continue working at a steady pace, treating it as one season instead of two.

@StuartK in AU we are able to apply for an automatic 3-week extension if a small group of individuals aren’t lodged by due date. I don’t expect this would ever be managed/driven by the tasks within a Work item/template though. More likely, we would want to be able to bulk update the Deadline on those Work items (if we felt it better, we may use Max’s approach and leave Deadline date and just work to complete ASAP anyway).

Is Deadline available in the Work view export to Excel (and I can’t see it) or not yet (and hopefully coming soon)? 🙂

What’s the expected release date for deadlines to everyone?

What’s the expected release date for deadlines to everyone?

We’re just putting the final touches on it so I don’t have an exact date, but as soon as we can. I would hazard a guess of a fortnight at most.

@StuartK  We are in the deadline beta and are having the current experience:

  • When creating any repeating work, a deadline of 1 day after start date is automatically being applied (even if we don’t want a deadline entered)
  • If we zero out the deadline area when setting up the initial repeat, it still generates a deadline as the start date instead of null deadline 

If the deadline doesn’t apply to the work item, is it the best practice to just go through the additional step of setting the deadline equal to the due date?

For example - on our tax work Yes we absolutely want the deadline as a way to track it separately vs the due date we promised to the client. And like Max said - we likely wouldn’t move the deadline if we extended it, we want to keep the urgency of when it should have been finished. 

 For payroll though, the due date is the due date and it varies for every single client. Should I have deadline = due date on everything else? It’s a bit extra work to set that up if that’s the case. 

 

Thanks for any additional insight. 

Thanks for the feedback @Megan Roberts - that default deadline of 1 day when no deadline is set on the original work item is definitely a bug - we’ll get that fixed ASAP!

In the meantime, I would just set the Deadline on the repeat work to “no deadline”, this avoid setting a deadline entirely. Let me know if that isn’t working for you and we can dig a little deeper.

 

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