Karbon Pros and Cons

Karbon is an exceptional system that helps keep everyone involved in client work organized and on track as long as it is used accurately and daily. It excels in allowing teams to create recurring pieces of work, each with specific tasks, ensuring nothing falls through the cracks. One of its standout features is the ability to centralize all communication within the tasks themselves. This means that not only are the decisions recorded, but the reasons behind those decisions are also documented, making it easy to revisit and understand the context if needed.

Additionally, Karbon integrates seamlessly with email, allowing all communications with customers to be saved to contact and work timelines. This makes reviewing past actions straightforward and ensures a comprehensive record of interactions and decisions. Overall, Karbon is an indispensable tool for maintaining organization and clarity in client work, even for the most disorganized individuals.

Karbon's Client Task feature simplifies the process of requesting sensitive information from customers. This feature allows the team to assign specific tasks directly to clients, who can then securely provide the required information. By using Client Tasks, teams can streamline communication and ensure sensitive data is collected efficiently and safely, all within the organized framework of the Karbon system. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Accessing a team member's Triage when they are unexpectedly out can be challenging. This limitation can cause delays or bottlenecks in the workflow, as it is not always straightforward to retrieve the necessary information or tasks the absent team member was managing without accessing this. Enhancing this feature to allow administrators to delegate access to another team member's triage when needed would significantly improve overall efficiency and ensure smoother operations during unforeseen absences. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

User friendly that easily integrates with other software. Knowing exactly where files are up to, even in the absence of the staff who control the file is invaluable. No more missed deadlines. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Nothing, it has changed our business for the better. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I love how Karbon has saved us a lot of time in the way we deal with emails in triage and being able to see timelines of emails for clients is so helpful and makes everyone's lives a lot easier. In addition seeing what everyone in the firm is working on and its current status in a matter of seconds is phenomal for our firm! even something as small as a feature like scheduling your emails I find great and you can set up emails to go out on days & times that suit you better. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I'd honestly say there's not much I don't like, I don't use the "to do list much" perhaps that could be improved, but overall Karbon is top notch practice management software. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I love the triage feature. It is so much better than using normal email, and it is easy to connect emails to work items that I don't need to work on now. That allows me to clear out my inbox quickly, and find the email when I need it. I love that my employees are able to be in there every day to make their jobs more efficient. It also doesn't take very long to train employees, which is great! Overall, I love Karbon and am glad we found it! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Document -> Document Storage system would be amazing, but currently the system is just okay. I also find that triage, my week, and work items sometimes becomes pretty hectic as the owner who is in charge of lots of emails, lots of work items, and tracking my employee's items. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Karbon makes it easy to have both a high level and in the weeds view of your assigned work and the work load of your department or colleauges. There are tools within the platform that help you have multiple big picture views of due, overdue, or planned work and allows you to organize that work based on when you want to get it done. We're able to communicate efficiently both internally and externally with the ability to email and @mention teammates on work items, so context and collaboration on kept with the specific client or work item. The implementation itself was very straightforward and it integrated seamlessly with our already operational Microsoft platforms (SharePoint/OneDrive & Outlook), but there is a lot of time invested on the front end to get the platform setup in a way that sets your team up for success. All work item templates have to be created according to your processes, but Karbon's customer support is TOP NOTCH and they assisted in that onboarding process every step of the way and long after onboarding was complete. We use this platform DAILY for ALL of our work flows, capacity planning, and even budget and revenue reporting. Within the work templates, you're able to make assignments to a specific team member, create automators that automatically notify a team member when they're up or change the status of a work item, send client requests with reminders and deadlines, connect to SharePoint and OneDrive so documents uploaded by clients are automatically stored to the right location, track time and budgets to keep your team on track, and so much more. We are SO pleased that we moved to Karbon as our all in one project management platform. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

In order to get the fullest out of your Karbon use, there is a lot of investment in the setup and maintenance of that setup to ensure work is tracked correctly, time and budgets are accurate, reporting is accurate, etc. You can totally get away with not spending the time to setup these minor details, but you'll miss out on the fullness of tracking and reporting that Karbon has to offer. Our team ended up discovering these details over time and have slowly invested the time necessary to ensure we get the most of our Karbon use. Additionally, although the billing platform in Karbon is great and can truly get the job done, our model and process resulted in still leveraging QBO and Ignition to bill our clients. It is barely an inconvenience as this system works better for our firm anyway. We also didn't find a lot of success in the Ignition - Karbon integration, so we input and reconcile our work items to service agreements manually. Lastly, many team members, particulary those on our technical teams, have expressed difficulty in mastering "My Week" which is the built in tool for organizing and planning your assigned work. I personally have not experienced this, I LOVE My Week and review it multiple times a day to plan out my tasks for the day, but it has been expressed by multiple team members that they have trouble leveraging My Week as it's intended. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Karbon removes the need for spreadhseets and manual processes when chasing clients. It also allows you to create a roadmap of tasks to complete each item of work, which is measurable against time budgets. In each stage of the process, you can build in 'Client Requests' which enable easy interaction with the client on queries and approvals, with automated remiders to the client until the outstanding items are provided. Prior to adopting Karbon, we'd set up and used for a short period, a competitor's PM solution, but Karbon substatially outshines thier offering in almsot all areas. Karbon also has fantastic customer support, with an Account Manager always on hand to help with training and troubleshooting. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I'd like to see the ability to send automated emails from Karbon, rather than just automated client requests, and also a greater range of placeholdings (links to wording/dates from the client file) which can be used in client communication. Also a backstop on the deadlines not to exceed the due date. Minor gumbles though, and with Karbon you always know they're constantly working on improvements, which are released reguarly. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Karbon has become a core software for our business and provides the infaustructure to scale. With consistency of processes, which can be well structured in Karbon, it allows the team to know excatly what's expected of them.

Tools such as My Week and Work views allow easy navidation of work items to be compelted, and you can get some very useful business wide metrics on status of client work. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

As they continue to move the dial forward on AI, this will become more and more useful. My only gripe is Text edit ability in Triage, I find myself using Outlook still for drafting more detailed emails. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I like that we are able to customize the workflows for our particular processes and how custom everything is in Karbon. I have found our admin time is significantly reduced by really using it at it's full capacity Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I would like to have Karbon connect with more apps with API end points for Zapier so the rest of the app tools we use can communicate automatically with eachother. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

1. Triage - Replace Slack with Comments on Emails & Jobs

2. Work - Automations so client responses can change Statuses & Due Date (Checklist 1 = 14 days due date, Checklist 2 = 3 days due date)

3. Time & Billing - you can see which clients you haven't billed.

4. Integrations - integrate with Practice Ignition - create new jobs

5. Always looking to improve the product, not just add bloatware.

Improve via AI email summaries, etc. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It's a short list here (and by listing them I strongly suspect Karbon will have removed these issues within a year):

1. Work Statuses - Planned, Ready to Start, Progress, Waiting and Completed are required Work Statuses and are both available statuses and "headers" for other statuses.

2. Triage Low Priority - Triage doesn't work as well as Gmails Updates/Promotions.

You can mark each newsletter Low Priority - then future emails will go to Low Priority (to not clutter your triage),

However you can only "Clear" emails in Bulk not Low Priority, and Low Priority is hard to get to .

3. Triage Keyboard Shortcuts - You can't simply move to next email after you've sent an email.

4. Non-Chargable Matters - You currently can't create Non-Chargable Clients or Work Items (to charge Internal Matter time to) - as Karbon Timesheets default to the Last Milestone charged, then easy to put chargable time on Non-Chargable Matters.

5. Click to Bill - you can't currently create a Bill directly from a Work Item, or easily view all the WIP entries for a Client so that you can easily determine what to bill in one screen (you can easily export to Excel though). Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Karbon's email triage is the best out there. To be able to assign an email to a client timeline at the click of a button or create a work task that was requested via email saves time and keeps tasks from falling through the cracks. Customer support is fantastic too! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I wish I could see my full calendar in Karbon. I open Outlook just to have my calendar up. I handle all of my email from within Karbon. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.