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Replies posted by Victoria Peters

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Erin JamisonKarbon Team

posted in Community Feedback

New to the community? Introduce yourself here!

Hello, I am Victoria Peters, COO at Envolta Inc. I truly love the challenges my team brings to me every day. We are a growing, 90% virtual firm, fully cloud integrated and my history is over 35 years in the old school traditional accounting industry - the challenges create themselves! My Linkedin www.linkedin.com/in/viclypeters if you would like to connect.My job revolves a lot around processes and systems and making sure our teams are working well, our clients are enjoying the experience and we all have the work life balance we want. It is a work in progress.I love to be outdoors but I must admit I have traded in the canoe and tent for an RV and full on ‘glamping’. Give me a campfire and clear view of the stars and stress melts away.

Erin JamisonKarbon Team

published in Share Tips & Best Practices

6 time-saving ideas for using Karbon Automators

This is such a powerful feature. It offers such clarity when a work items move between team members, ownership and status of the work can change and the work does not get lost. I would like each person who worked on that file to get credit for completing their part on time - I will be adding that to the feature request!

Ian VacinKarbon Team

asked in Ask a Peer

Question for everyone: Interested in billing rates and/or fixed fees per service by geography?

I’m curious. Are firms in Canada using these billing rates in a Time & Billing format or as the foundation for setting up fixed-price contracts?We estimate the time each role will contribute to an engagement and create a fixed price from there. When I look at the rates from the survey we seem to be running a little higher but I wonder if that is in part because our clients do not see those rates in their contracts.

Lachlan MacindoeKarbon Team

posted in Ask a Peer

WANTED: Webinar panelists to review the year in accounting

I would like to put David Dinardo’s name forward (nope, I did not ask him but I am sure he would be game!). David is all about growth for Envolta and his passion will definitely come through on the panel you are planning.At Envolta we have made a number of changes over the last few months to set us up for the changes, trends and challenges we see coming. We are 90% virtual with team members across Canada and team members working from locations outside of Canada on extended travel.

Erin JamisonKarbon Team

asked in Ask a Peer

Question for everyone: How are virtual bookkeeping companies staffed?

We are in Canada and with the borders closed we don’t even have any staff on temporary travel to the US. We issue income tax information slips based on residency status, as a Canadian company, we do not issue W2 or T1099.We have staff members in 4 different Provinces (at the moment) and one overseas on extended travel so we make it a priority to ensure communication and build culture. Our teams cover multiple time zones, communication through Karbon and Zoom meetings set up to accommodate the time of day each attendee is in and ‘communication windows’ are important to keep our team members in the loop. We have a weekly All Team Zoom meeting and record video updates that go out weekly from our CEO. our teams have regular training and meetings at the team level and by role (our production team meets with COO and CIO without their direct managers). The freedom for our staff to be able to move (changing Province, downsizing, upsizing, moving out of the city) based on what is best for th

CarlaCaldwellRising Star

posted in Share Tips & Best Practices

Best Practice: How I remind myself of an email

I love this, I have not used the waiting for information from client status this way. I also like to add a comment when I assign any email to myself or a colleague to highlight any details or why I have assigned it. Particularly useful if the email is long.There have been many times where I have looked at an email saved in my To Do list and I have forgotten why it is there….This does work on Notes as well - you just need to make sure that the statuses you want are assigned to Notes and Emails through the Default Work Types.

jamieokaneRising Star

asked in Share Tips & Best Practices

What are best practices when setting up contacts?

We have found setting up Client Groups by type of engagement helps as well. We use Client Groups to group our contacts by Annual, Monthly-Gold, Monthly-Silver, Monthly-Bronze and Payroll only. We can see how our engagements are spread across teams and filter dashboards to help prioritize work and manage capacity.

Lisa SilverBeginner

asked in Share Tips & Best Practices

What are best practices for onboarding new clients?

We have found that the information comes from the client through various means, some during the initial contact and proposal preparation and forms that we use when potential clients reach out through our website, through kick off meetings and casual conversations.We have created a custom template that includes tasks designed to bring all of that separately sourced information into a central place. This will include linking emails and recorded zoom meetings as well as notes. We will bring in client tasks once we have established a relationship.Our onboarding template also has a strong focus on setting our team and internal processes, ensuring the scope of the engagement is clearly defined for the team, that all of the correct work orders are in place with appropriate cycles, deadlines, assignees, and Fees and Budgets set up and that the profile in Karbon is source of truth.As important as onboarding is to the success of the engagement it is just as important that it not drag out too l

BrooksWSuperstar

asked in Ask a Peer

How do I find specifics around what Karbon can/can't do?

I love Karbon Support and the content that Karbon puts out - articles and webinars as amazing resources and logging in to see the New Release pop up is a good day.I am also all about Trial & Error. I have learned so much by just trying it out or seeing what my team is doing.

fll20201Beginner

asked in Share Tips & Best Practices

Seasonal Budgets

Thinking out loud here but could you set up separate repeating monthly work orders with the repeating cycle that matches the season? If there are only 2 seasons it might look like thisHigh season Work Order - starts August 1 repeats monthly until May 31st, with the appropriate budgets and tasksLow season Work Order - starts June 1 repeats monthly until Aug 31st, with the appropriate budgets and tasksAnd then you create another work order to repeat every season to remind you to re-start the seasonal work orders for the next season.I think that is how I would do this if I know the season are easily predictable.With some of our seasonal clients we have set up seasonal re-engagements, rather then re-engage on an annual basis, we create new contracts for each season and when that is accepted the work orders push through to Karbon for that season.Hope this helps.

A

Anonymous

New options for Automators and more!

Love the automator flexibility - already experimenting with it where sections are being worked on by team members at the same time but after the initial or client sections sections are complete. I’m excited to dig in deeper.And the side tray - YEAH! Especially nice on the tasks, that visibility is incredibly helpful.

FiSchneiderBeginner

asked in Ask a Peer

How do you engage new employees/team with Karbon?

Our early days with Karbon were a struggle with this type of resistance, everyone had their own way of keeping track of there work, with varying degrees of success and little to no visibility but we did have a few who saw the value right away and we leveraged that every chance we could.If you have a Karbon champion could you buddy them up with the team member who is struggling? Have them share the ways they are using Karbon, the value they have found in their own day to day, the tips they have to keep their Triage clean and To-do list manageable and the value of setting up dashboards for themselves.We have our new hires go through Karbon training as part of their onboarding and encourage them to go back to it after a few weeks to pick up any nuggets that may make more sense after working with it for awhile. We have created our own training material that covers how we use Karbon at our firm, this helps solidify how integral Karbon is to how our firm operates.Maybe even have your Karbo

CoralSuperstar

asked in Ask a Peer

Time and Budgets

Hi Coral, We input a budget as a part of our precommencement tasks in each work item. Before the work can begin, the accountants tell us how much time they believe the job will take and we input it into a spreadsheet based on our average percentage of time for each staff member. From there we input it into the budget section of the work item. This has been extremely useful for us in our first year of using Karbon as we now have fantastic visibility across which clients take more time than we initially thought, and which clients tend to be super efficient and we've been able to adjust our billing and capacity planning accordingly. I hope this helps! Cas We so something similar before the work starts. First we have set up the billable rates for each role and each team member has been identified by their role in Karbon. When we set up the work orders we add the budget by assignee, distributing the fee we are charging across the work orders. We can see pretty quickly if we are charging

MiyaRising Star

asked in Share Tips & Best Practices

What are others preferred tools?

We use Practice Protect for cyber security. All of our APPs on one platform with a single sign in that uses 2 factor verification. It’s easy to use and allows for much better controls on access, onboarding and offboarding team members. And most importantly I only have to remember 1 password at any given time. Our whole team is loving it.

MiyaRising Star

asked in Share Tips & Best Practices

What are others preferred tools?

We use Practice Protect for cyber security. All of our APPs on one platform with a single sign in that uses 2 factor verification. It’s easy to use and allows for much better controls on access, onboarding and offboarding team members. And most importantly I only have to remember 1 password at any given time. Our whole team is loving it. @Victoria Peters how do you find it works with client-shared logins where the client provides you their login credentials? We were told that would block the client from logging in. They also don’t have a great process for accessing mobile apps. If you add a login to PP and you want to access the mobile app, it will open your browser instead. Kinda frustrating and they need to fix that asap, in my opinion. We use 1Password. LastPass is great @blueprintbrian Fair. We try to avoid shared logins as much as possible but unfortunately there will be some outliers. Always more that can be done for cyber security. I find PP works well with

Gary WoodRising Star

asked in Ask a Peer

Email (Triage) > Workflow, or Vice Versa

We were not satisfied with the workflow system we were using, so it was definitely workflow. It actually took some time for the team to fully buy into the email management.

CuanBeginner

asked in Ask a Peer

Workflow & to-do date & status automation

Following - these are great questions.To get around this you could create a separate work order with the start date that you want, instead of using a section. Of course that means it would not trigger automators for the rest of existing work order, unless you moved all of that to the new work order as well. The above solution could add to your second issue. To deal with an overwhelming To-do list we use sub tasks (with no assignment or due date). Only the main task is assigned and dated so it shows up on the To-do list - I rename it identifying how many subtasks are associated and only mark it complete when all of the sub tasks are complete. eg. Process current month (6 tasks) If you have not already done it, be sure to submit a feature request for To-do automators, it’s a great idea.

grgpennBeginner

asked in Ask a Peer

red dot on Triage

It doesn't appear so but you can add a feature suggestion - https://help.karbonhq.com/en/articles/1573283-submitting-feature-requests I hear that the product team pulls a report regularly to inform their product roadmap. I was just coming in to make the same suggestion. I have seen and heard Stuart and others on the Karbon team talk about the importance of turning off notifications to help focus. Great idea.

A

Anonymous

Share your Saved Work Views with others, and more!

YES! The number of times I have walked people through setting up a dashboard so they understand where I am coming from is now a simple ‘copy this link’. Several shares have already happened and members of my team are buzzing over this update, thank you.

MiyaRising Star

asked in Share Tips & Best Practices

How do you keep track of your to-do list?

I take a similar approach as Coral to clear Triage first, assigning what I can from there to my or my colleague’s to-do lists.I find that setting the due dates to accurately reflect when I truly believe the work will get done helps prioritize the work.For items in the future I will also set a future to-do date and status updates if appropriate, so my to-do list does not look too crazy.And then depending on the day I will change how I sort.My default sort by is due date and that usually keeps me on track if I have allocated reasonable due dates.If I am having a deep work kind of day or a day that doesn’t happen to have a lot of currently due items I will sort by client and knock off what I can from there. When I just don’t know where to start I will sort by status - at the very least that view will help me revisit priorities, set dates and go back to my default sort by due date that may now have items that are currently due..

Daniela Antlova

asked in Share Tips & Best Practices

Dealing with "for later - reading" type of emails in Karbon

I have handled this by creating a private, internal contact for myself using my title as the contact name. and under that contact I have work orders where I can park items to read later.I have a General Articles to Read work order but I have also created work orders for specific Newsletters like Karbon’s Practice Excellence that comes out weekly and another one for Atomic Habits for example. By setting up defined work orders or parking lots the timelines don’t get too cluttered.These work orders have no due date in my case, so they live at the bottom of my To-Do list. If you wanted to group these emails by date you could set up the work order with a schedule and due dates.I usually skim the topics in the newsletter or email before I assign it and if something catches my eye I will add a comment about that before I clear it so when I go back I tend to start with the reading that already caught my eye.When I have the time I will go to that work order and pick and choose the articles th

AntoniyaB.Superstar

asked in Share Tips & Best Practices

Templates - share your favourites

We had a number set up before the library came out, many created after attending a Karbon webinar on creating templates or on using automators but as processes get upgraded or tweaked so go the templates. We will be digging into the library for ideas on those upgrades. And looking for any that we should have. I would also love to know which templates people have found to be most useful.One step at a time.

Marjolyn NobleBeginner

asked in Ask a Peer

How to manage repeating jobs for Monthly IAS's but Quarterly BAS

Hi there, We’re UK based, but have a similar job set up. We have a monthly reoccurring for book-keeping services and then a separate job for quarterly VAT. The VAT is run after the period end (ie for the period Jan to March - worked on in April) so I use the titles to show the period and then on the reoccurring job, select a drop down box to choose previous period. Does that help? We follow a similar approach for GST/HST in Canada.I have found that to make periods work, have the right people on the work and have accurate start and due dates separating the work into a couple of work orders is most effective. Once the cycles are set up and running there is much less chance of missing something ‘out of sync’ if it has it’s own work order rather then a placeholder.

Elizabeth OrtizBeginner

asked in Share Tips & Best Practices

Karbon Work Dashboard

Hi All, Right now our Dashboard show the work for the employee but not tasks on the schedule for work not owned by them. Does anyone have suggestions on how to navigate this so our employees can see all “work” they are responsible for completing? Thanks so much for helping me. Liz ortiz Hi Elizabeth, Maybe this will be helpful: Dashboards -> use the filter COLLEAGUES INVOLVED (add the colleagues if there are any tasks assigned to them it will display as involved) -> then Kanban view by Sort by Assignee Just coming in to say this as well. COLLLEAGUES INVOLVED has been a game changer for us. And if you have set up budgets you will see the budgeted time for that work as well as the number of tasks.

kylenecarseCommunity Champion

posted in Share Tips & Best Practices

What's your top used Karbon dashboards?

Also Team Can-Ban!And definitely have many dashboards but in my role I need to look at work by team, so have several that are filtered by Colleague Involved so I can see capacity by team (Budgets), revenue (Fixed Fees), and work completed in specific time periods. And then I will also have ones specific to work like HST Due this month for example. I really like the payroll example as well - need to get my teams to work on that one.Every so often I do go through my list of dashboards and clean it up.I am also so happy to be able to share my dashboards with the each team’s leadership so they can see exactly what I am looking at and be ready for me when we talk about it.

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