I believe the development focus for Karbon may be off track. Several “features” are rolled out in what seems to be a never ending beta. Examples below:
- We can’t see time trends by client without downloading XLS files and doing pivots. A simple time graph on the Organization page would be super helpful for those of us on fixed fee engagements.
- The inability to create bulk tasks in Karbon is problematic. TaxDome (a product with lower fundraising than Karbon has) rolled this out as well as other products on the market. I’m happy to go the API route, but not knowing if Karbon is going to focus on native feature improvements or open to other developers building on top of the Karbon API is a big Q. None of us want to go the API route only to find that you built it natively.
- The latest feature release is 100% focused on Practice Intelligence - which is an add on with a pricing model of work items. We all have 1,000’s of work items. This pricing model is not designed to create early adopters to the Karbon PI tools. Why are we being charged to access our own data? I get that you can charge a fee for it, but why not make it a per user fee like email insights. The more complex your pricing model the less adoption you will get.
- Where are custom fields, email delegation, email draft sharing, and email templates? Canopy, TaxDome and others have components of this already.
- Custom fields or tags for Work and Organizations? Client Owner and Client Manager are not sufficient. There could be a Tax Manager or other roles that need to be easily identifiable in the product - otherwise we are forced to go outside of Karbon and further reduce the value proposition.
- I get that email triage and attaching email to work is the main reason people are on Karbon, but the needs of modern firm owners are much more dynamic than that.
- The billing beta doesn’t even allow a billing report by time entries (which is how 90% of firms bill).
- I would argue that more practitioners need to be part of the development process.
- We can’t see realization reports or hours worked by team members over time, or hours by client over time without toggling 18 different custom field ranges.
Just a few thoughts for the team to consider. Overall, I love the product and believe the team can execute, but the dev timeline seems misaligned in some way.
