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What are best practices when setting up contacts?

  • 3 August 2021
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What are best practices when setting up contacts? When should we use people, orgs/companies or client group?

What is the best way to set up a tax return project for a family?

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Best answer by Victoria Peters 4 August 2021, 15:19

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Really good questions and ones that we had right away when we started with Karbon. 

Person Contact - One of our Karbon onboarding team members explained it best - “A simple way of thinking about it is anyone with a heartbeat should be created as a Person. Even if the person is a sole practitioner.”  You can then further differentiate the types of “persons” you are in contact with using the Contact Type designation - ex:  Client, Vendor, Prospect, etc...

Organization -   Any company with a legal formation or even a dba name (that you refer to separately from the owner/ practitioner), should have an organization created.  This could also include estates and trusts.  Organizations can also be used to represent a family unit that files a joint tax return.  You could also use the Contact Type field to further customize your organizations - ex:  Client - C-Corp, Client - Trust, Client - Sole Prop, Client - Joint, etc...

Client Group - This type of contact is used to associate Person and Organization contacts that are related by ownership or financial structure - ex:  Smith Group - used to associate Jane Smith (Person) and Smith & Assoc. (Org) together.  You could also use Client Groups to associate family members - ex:  Smith Family - John Smith, Joe Smith, and Jane Smith (Persons)

Tax Return Project for Family

For a family that files one tax return/joint tax return, it’s best to create an Organization representing the spouses or family.  We typically name these organizations Last Name, First Name & First Name - but you can use whatever naming convention works best for you and your firm.  Then associate the Person contacts using the contact cards.  

You can create work for both Organizations and for Persons, so it’s important to make sure you are assigning work to the correct contact! 

Hope this helps!!

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Firstly you need to set up client types - Sole Trader, Ltd etc. Then, when you create a “Client” you tag them as one of the client types. When a Contact is associated with a Company, then you just add them as a contact (but not a client type). I hope this helps!

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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.

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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.

That is a super idea! We have tiered offerings as well!

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Ohhh that’s a great idea!!  Thank you @Victoria Peters 

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we used client groups as it’s great so see the members, but unfortunately when information come in from practice ignition it can’t connect to a client group, only to people and organization. Anyone has any lead on how to handle this issue?

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