Karbon

The Superman-Batman-Crocodile Dundee-Indiana Jones-Dog Whisperer of Team Communication and Project Mgmt Tool

Opmerkingen: Have you ever wanted ONE SPOT to check email, delegate task, manage projects and customers? Karbon is IT. NOthing else compares to this robust, all inclusive system. Forget Twist and Slack, and your gmail or outlook, zendesk and all the rest. This program, while made for the accounting industry, is the perfect solution for any industry, and even a single individual could use it, but it shines with many users. No more multiple things to check and manage, it's all in one place. From Triage, you empty your inbox for email and @ tags from within the system and assign emails to other team members, create work from emails, and all correspondence tracks back to both contacts and pieces of work, so nothing is ever lost or hard to search. This is the most intelligent productivity solution available; I've tried many to disappointing results and now will stay with Karbon and not continue to look further. You can see work for the whole business, for yourself, and separately for your team. You can assign work to others, you can even assign tasks to clients and people outside your team, so they have their own checklist, which has comments and attachments - no more 10k emails! You can break down work into sections with different checklists and assign each task it's own team member and due date. You can drag and drop tasks to different dates. You can have templates for work to make creating work easy. You can make client tasks in these templates and also schedule repeating work. I can't go on, there are too many things that are amazing about this program. Do yourself a favor and try it out. I put it off for 8 months and after 2 days was hooked. 5 months later, it just keeps getting better and easier as we get more proficient using the program to its full potential. AMAZING! Nothing less than Amazing. Nothing slips through the cracks with Karbon.

Pluspunten:

Everything about Karbon.

Minpunten:

They have both of these on their Fall 2017 roadmap: 1) time clock for job/client/employee time tracking (which is the only other external program we now use and can't wait to only use Karbon for everything); 2) Canned Responses (template emails plug & play). Coming soon, and I can deal with these cons because of everything else has saved so much time.

KarbonApp for the Growing Firm

Opmerkingen: Wonderful and I can't wait to continue to gain further best practice and utilize all the components around capacity planning etc.

Pluspunten:

We implemented Karbon only a short time ago and I am already seeing significant impact on my time through the ease of delegation of specific tasks and the ownership of those tasks to be able to check provide oversite. My staff has had a similar response and although it has been a learning curve we all see the potential and benefits.

Minpunten:

There are a few items around being able to apply templates after work is created (currently you cannot do this only at creation). It also takes the server five minutes or so to show a contact that you add which is a pain when setting up new client work. We had asked to have contact emails imported and although they were provided for some reason they did not get imported (that combined with the delay was a bit of a pain). A few other items are more about learning how to get the best use out of all so I would argue are not dislikes but more learning curves as it changes the way you work significantly with the implementation of triage. Overall the team at Karbon have been great in answering any questions and give a lot of opportunity to show you best practice even when you choose the self implementation option. I do hope they create more integrations with Xero Accounting Software as they do with QBO.

The well deserved leader in Practice Management for Accountants and Bookkeepers.

Opmerkingen: The Karbon employees are amazing. Helpful and friendly. Also, Karbon offers quite a bit of general support to help run an accounting firm, from weekly webinars to an online magazine and blog they seem like they are invested in your practice in general. This support has been helpful on numerous occasions!

Pluspunten:

The best thing about Karbon is the automation that is built into the existing templates and the ease at implementing it into custom templates.

Minpunten:

The biggest challenge with Karbon is the time it can take to learn the idiosyncrasies of the software. It sometimes seems counterintuitive but if you take the time to learn the software things will make sense.

Not worth the money - there are lots of other options

Opmerkingen: I hope it's improved since I tried using it. I know Karbon has a lot of positive reviews, and it has always confused me because I liked a lot of the other project management applications we looked at better than it. But who knows - maybe my brain just doesn't work right for this particular piece of software.

Pluspunten:

It's a good-looking, flashy app. I liked being able to assign emails to coworkers and clients and my own tasks. Full disclosure: we used this for about three months at my company and then abandoned it. It just was not helpful to us.

Minpunten:

My list of complaints about Karbon is long. Mostly, I feel like they hint at features that only technically exist. For example, Karbon integrates with QuickBooks Online, but I cannot understand why. It doesn't pull in relevant company information from QBO - not even company addresses. Those have to be manually entered. And yes, you can read your emails in Karbon, but you lose a lot of Gmail functionality when you make the switch: you can't sort emails into folders, save contacts into segmented lists, etc. Emails aren't even marked as read in Gmail! And, Karbon doesn't sync your contacts from Gmail. It brings in everyone you've emailed with. This is not helpful and extremely messy. There is no Google Calendar sync, which is what I use to sync my iCalendar and send my times and dates to all of my devices. So I just found Karbon really frustrating, especially at the price point - I feel like a lot was promised that wasn't delivered.

Karbon - The best tool for an accounting practice

Pluspunten:

Allows me to have a wholistic view of our company through tools like My Week. Very useful to be able to manage and allocate work at the beginning of the week through the my week tool. Triage and the ability to assign/tasks/emails/mentions to employees, clients or client specific work. There is also an integration coming with suit files that will be very useful for practices i.e. some features that will come are document signing client portal integrations, and document management. This will help us automate a lot more. Auto-maters are definitely very useful, partially the ability to automatically change job statuses and assign tasks/work to colleges according where the job is in the process.

Minpunten:

Definitely not being able to independently bulk update tasks without having to pay. Bulk update features are very important but not available (unless you pay the $999 build fee package, which might to expensive for some). The lack of integrations are (most notably, not integrating with Xero or XPM). The best option is if you already have Ignition (this allows content to flow from XPM to Ignition than to Karbon). No integrations into CRM systems. Automated do not have an "IF" functionality where if i.e. the client doesn't need to have more documents requested while the work is completed there should be the ability to tick a box that automatically triggers a different work flow.