Share Tips & Best Practices

Find and share Karbon tips and tricks, and get inspired by others

148 Discussions
578 Replies

Dee JohnsKarbon Team

posted in Share Tips & Best Practices

Here’s a recording of the KPI virtual roundtable

Earlier, Ian, Logan and Saadat co-hosted a virtual roundtable, specifically for our customers, about Karbon Practice Intelligence (KPI)!We covered: An introduction to KPI The power of bringing together various datasets from your firm with KPI How KPI can help you make faster, more insightful and informed decisions, and improve productivity How to visualize your data without coding by using pre-built workbooks How to explore and action the data insights by going straight to the data source Best practice approaches to reusable and repeatable data visualization We would love to hear what you think about KPI, as well as any questions or feedback you have. You can add your thoughts right here in the comments below.

13 days ago

Erin JamisonKarbon Team

published in Share Tips & Best Practices

Using TSheets with the new Time & Budgets feature

Are you looking to utilize TSheets together with Karbon’s new Time & Budgets functionality? As part of our Time & Budgets release, we have upgraded our integration with TSheets. In order to use the two together, you will need to have custom fields turned on in TSheets to record time against roles and tasks types. Where the ‘Time’ Tab initially was, we now have a ‘Time & Budgets’ tab. This can be found on both a contact view as well as the work view. The ‘Time & Budgets’ tab will show you information such as: Budgets by team member Time entered Expenses For those who are using TSheets, how has this experience been for you?

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17 days ago

Dwain LynchBeginner

asked in Share Tips & Best Practices

Using smartsheet in Karbon or creating a similar workflow

Good afternoon,My name is Dwain and am employed by JM Business Solutions. I wanted to inquire about pulling Smartsheet into Karbon or to create something in Karbon that is similar. If anyone has that information to share, please let me know. Thanks in advance.Best,Dwain

1 month ago

maxSr. Karbon Community Guide

posted in Share Tips & Best Practices

Book Club

Many of you all actively seek excellence.What books have made the most impact on your journey?Why did they have an impact?Feel free to add a quote to a book already listed. I’ll go first and will add to this list as people add books in the comments. 😁Table of ContentsTable of Contents Professional Development Learning to Lead, Leading to Learn The Toyota Way to Service Excellence Personal Development Crucial Conversations (Third Edition) The Power of When Fun Books The Enderverse The Casual Vacancy Biography Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World Alexander Hamilton Professional DevelopmentLearning to Lead, Leading to Learnby Katie AndersonKatie had the amazing opportunity to spend many hours interviewing, learning from, and discussing leadership with one of Toyota’s key executives. It’s an interesting window into wise leadership through ups and downs throughout his career. - @max The Toyota Way to Service Excellenceby Jeffrey Liker and Karyn RossThis book uses storie

1 month ago

Dee JohnsKarbon Team

published in Share Tips & Best Practices

Here’s a recording of the KPI webinarKPI

Earlier, Ian, Logan and Saadat co-hosted a webinar, about Karbon Practice Intelligence (KPI)!Moving from insight to action with self-service data, firms can quickly identify and respond to critical business questions at tax time.Where are the bottlenecks in workflows? Where is the firm tracking this month in billable hours vs. planned? What is the capacity of the team to complete work on time?We would love to hear what you think about KPI, as well as any questions or feedback you have. You can add your thoughts right here in the comments below.

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1 month ago

Amanda FrisiusBeginner

asked in Share Tips & Best Practices

@ mention same group

If you frequently need to @ Mention the same group of Colleagues you should consider creating one of these and adding them as members? Work team, colleague, client team or team?

1 month ago

Tracey FiskeBeginner

asked in Share Tips & Best Practices

Contact Look Up Options

I have asked several times over the last 2 years, why can't we look up a contact by phone number? We get text messages and voicemails from clients that do not provide their names, it would be helpful to look them up by the phone number.

1 month ago

Trevor SunnyBeginner

asked in Share Tips & Best Practices

mentioning people in an email

Hi, How can I mention a person [or colleague(s)] in an email?Thanks in advance.

1 month ago

DianeKSr. Community Champion

posted in Share Tips & Best Practices

Feature Request: Drag and drop into client tasks

I have a feature request I would love to see implemented. We are in the process of updating our tax work items. In a regular section, I can copy the update from my working copy and then drag the changes into the correct section. For Client tasks, this feature is not available. I end up having to add each update individually, which is very time consuming. If I could also drag and drop into a client task, this would really speed up the process.We can’t reset the work item to the template. The client task has a set first 5 tasks and then it is individualized for each client. We are trying to update our first 5 tasks without loosing the individual tasks.If you can drag and drop into a regular section, why not make it so you can drag and drop into a client section as well? Please request this feature as well if you think it would be useful.

1 month ago

MiyaRising Star

asked in Share Tips & Best Practices

What are others preferred tools?

What are others preferred tools? i.e. password management

1 month ago

maxSr. Karbon Community Guide

posted in Share Tips & Best Practices

Human Accounting Mastermind - Collaborate to solve complex business problems through human-centric continuous improvement.

[UPDATE] Indefinitely postponedI’d like to try again with less rigidity and more collaborative sharing. Less seminar and more “Here’s a problem we had and how we solved it” and “Here’s a problem we have, how are y’all solving it” framework. The NewsMastermind DatesLink: Subscribe to Calendar (Tap the dates below to add individual dates to your calendar)July 7, 2022 August 4, 2022 September 1, 2022 October 6, 2022 November 3, 2022 December 1, 2022We are experimenting with holding the meetings at 3:00 PM - 5:00 PM ET. That may change upon receiving more feedback (drop a comment! 😀)The HypothesisTaken together, the companies in this community have solved most of the problems accounting firms face. The more we share, the more we can collectively learn to be better, more human-centric companies.The ExperimentWe will be experimenting with hosting a monthly video call where the people who join will work through the steps to define and improve complex business problems. We will run it like a

1 month ago

William MertzBeginner

asked in Share Tips & Best Practices

Establishment of a Karbon Users Group

I would be interested in starting a small (8 - 10 firms) user group who would be interested in meeting for an hour a month to discuss how everyone is fully utilizing Karbon, etc. Please feel free to reach out to me at wmertz@corporatecfo.com if you are interested.

1 month ago

SamGSr. Community Champion

posted in Share Tips & Best Practices

PEW 79 Article: 3 wrong arguments against remote working

I read this and was taken by this quote: To me, it seems like a bit of a pointless quote/comment.Should you recruit people you don’t trust? No.Should you immediately trust anybody and everybody you meet? Also no.How does Finn Kelly recruit?Only recruit people they already know and fully trust?Have an onerous recruitment process that establishes trust before an offer of employment is made?To be clear, if you are distrusting of someone, I agree you shouldn’t hire them, but realistically, I think you are recruiting people who you don’t know and don’t yet trust, more often than not.

1 month ago

David SadowskyRising Star

asked in Share Tips & Best Practices

Advice on onboard CURRENT clients

The templates in Karbon are great for Onboarding new clients. How do people usually handle onboarding current clients - we are moving them from sharefile and no communication type portal to Karbon. I could just email my clients and let them know (with whatever other information we decide to include), or create a current client template with a client request and have that include the same exact information. Is there a benefit to one over the other?

1 month ago

Erin JamisonKarbon Team

published in Share Tips & Best Practices

6 time-saving ideas for using Karbon Automators

I like to think of Karbon’s Automators as ‘if this, then that’ rules. You let you set task and work statuses, assignees or more to automatically updated based on a certain activity happening (such as the preceding tasks being completed). They are one of the most powerful ways you can use Karbon to take care of all that boring admin work, and save your team a ton of time in the process. Here are 6 of our favorite ways that we’re seeing Automators being used. If we’ve missed any of the go-to ways you use Automators, we’d love to hear from you. Leave a comment below! Let your colleague know their tasks are ready to start. A lot of tasks in your workflow are dependent on others being completed first. If you’re preparing a tax return, the work papers can’t be started until the financial statements have been signed off. Or if you’re performing payroll, there is a lot that needs to happen before pay run can be scheduled. This might be OK if you’re the one completing each step in th

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1 month ago

maxSr. Karbon Community Guide

posted in Share Tips & Best Practices

Connect Karbon API to Excel

Skip ahead:Introduction Template Files Instructions Troubleshooting Use-Cases and ExamplesIntroductionThe goal of this post is to help you connect the Karbon API to Excel.I will be updating this post with better code (more comments), and instructions on how to get this set up. I may do a series of posts loosely related to pulling in data from Karbon to model and use in Excel using Power Query and Power Pivot.If you use any of these functions or have better ways of executing this code, I would love to see your comments.Specific use cases should be addressed in new topics and then linked back to this topic. The most useful and interesting use cases posted in the comments will get added to this OP.Template FilesLink: Human Accounting Mastermind Document RepositoryIn the link above, you will find template files for Excel and Power BI (coming soon). These files have everything you need to get started, but there are some additional setup steps that I will cover below.InstructionsHow to add y

1 month ago

Kara ReddingBeginner

asked in Share Tips & Best Practices

Colleagues able to make changes in someone else's My Week?

Hi everyone,We would like to encourage colleagues in supervisory roles to periodically check in on their assigned staff’s My Week as an added layer of transparency. However, when testing this out today, we realized that if you go into a colleagues My Week, it is possible for you to make changes, like moving things around or even moving something to Done. That makes me nervous. I don’t think any of our staff would move anything intentionally, but accidents happen, right? Has anyone run into this concern? How did you handle it?Thanks,Kara

2 months ago

SmittyRising Star

asked in Share Tips & Best Practices

Seasonal employees

We are curious how other firms who utilize seasonal employees involve them (or not) in the Karbon ecosystem. Any best practices to share?

2 months ago

Erin JamisonKarbon Team

published in Share Tips & Best Practices

Using Zapier with Karbon to help automate your workflow

Zapier is a great tool that allows you to connect your Karbon account with more than 2,000 apps. You can sync your data with different cloud accounting solutions, sales and marketing tools, CRMs and much more. Here are a few of our favorite “Zaps” that can help you automate your workflow and save you hours within your week. Keeping your contacts up-to-date with your cloud accounting software:One benefit of this ‘Zap’ is that as you make updates to important client details within Karbon you can ensure that your other databases will stay in-sync with this Zap Trigger: Person/Organization Contact Updated in KarbonAction: Create & Update Contact in your cloud accounting appYou can also do this in reverse. For example, if a new client is updated in your cloud accounting solution, you can automatically update a new contact in Karbon.Trigger: Contact Updated in accounting softwareAction: Update Person/Organization Contact in KarbonPossible apps: QuickBooks Online, FreshbooksView the tem

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2 months ago

Victoria PetersSr. Community Champion

asked in Share Tips & Best Practices

What Karbon hack have you created that you are most proud of?

I’ll go first - I have created a Hidden, Internal contact for myself (I used my role as the name of the contact since using my name would be problematic)Under this contact I have created several work orders that are not related to clients (internal reporting prep, setting up regular meetings, Newsletter creation...) but are key to me staying on top of my work.The repeating schedule matches the work I have weekly commitments broken down by task, I keep the status updated on each task so even if I get interrupted I will know where I am at on my weekly commitments. Bi-weekly/Monthly/Quarterly are set up so I don’t drop the ball because time flies. I have them set so the tasks populate 1 day before the start date so it is always a current list of tasks. I link emails and notes as they come in but do not have to shift my focus to that work until it’s time to actually work on it. Some are simply ‘parking lots’ for items I don’t want to lose track of One off projects that may have severa

2 months ago

Stuart McLeodKarbon Team

posted in Share Tips & Best Practices

Would you like new airpods? Yes, again! A completely different opportunity this time.

OK! You may have heard of the Accounting Leaders Podcast? Or you may not have. Doesn’t matter! Either way, this might be of interest to you, our esteemed Karbon customer.I’m looking for a partner or director of firms to come on the podcast with an interesting or exciting or different or beloved client of yours. This client should be doing amazing things in the world. They might have grown a successful retail business or they could be saving the planet or curing cancer. The point is that their story must be interesting.What’s also important is your relationship with this client. I really want to hear from them what you mean to them as a client of your firm and what they mean to you. The journey that you have been on together is what really matters.If you have clients that come to mind, then I would love to hear from you. Reach out to me here or at stuart@ you know the rest!We already have 1 lined up, so we’re under way.And yes - if we feature you on the podcast, I’ll get you some Airpod

2 months ago

Daniela Antlova

asked in Share Tips & Best Practices

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

We all get various emails with newsletters, blogs etc., things we may want to put “in a pile” and perhaps read once a week, maybe at the end of each day.I want to set up a way to clear these from Triage but have a nice virtual “pile” to go to when I have my reading time scheduled. I would like that “pile” to be in Karbon rather than in Outlook. Anybody has a smart system for this?I know I can add these to my To Do list but I am not loving the To Do list function, I way prefer the Work Kanban view but that would require me turning these emails into “Work” which does not make much sense. I am guessing I could set up a private client “Reading” and add each such email to this client and then check it through the To do list when I am ready.But if anyone has any other process that they love for themselves for this I would love to hear it. Thanks!

2 months ago

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Share Tips & Best Practices

Here's a recording of our recent KPI webinarKPI

Here’s a recording of the KPI webinarKPI

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