Karbon Pros and Cons

Karbon keeps our firm organized and more efficient. Karbon has greatly reduced our e-mail traffic and provides so much visibility into what is going on across the firm. We are proud to let our clients know that we use Karbon and impress them with the client request lists from Karbon. We invest in the annual support package and have received great assistance from Ernesto Beltran, our customer success manager. He helped us roll out our standard month end close template firm-wide other things. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The integration with Quickbooks Time has resulted in duplicates in Quickbooks Time, but that has been our only difficulty with Karbon. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Easy to implement with numerous features and efficient allocation. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Implement department-wise filters. For example, when someone from the tax department logs in, they should be able to directly see which files are allocated to them, which are on hold, and which are in progress. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Karbon allows me to stay on top of all my tasks in an easy and efficient manner. I use Karbon all day to organize and prioritize my work. Customer support is wonderful and on top of answering questions. Karbon is easy to learn and it's many features make working through multiple companies seamless. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

There are only a couple of small things that I would love to see implemented to make my experience with Karbon flow easier. But there isn't anything that would keep me from recommending this to other bookkeeping firms. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

My favorite feature about Karbon is the email traige and transparency. Being able to have internal communication about emails and allow other team members to see emails without having to reply/forward has improved transparency and customer service across the firm. Fewer emails fall through the cracks and the team can support each other better.

Being able to assign emails to work items also speeds up managing email so we're able to set an email in a place we know it won't get forgotten when we go to complete a specific work item. This also allows us to deal quickly with email and then break our work into intentional checks - a major productivity improvement. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I only have two minor issues with Karbon. The work items and tasks are all designed to operate in a linear fashion and sometimes work does not happen in a linear form, so the automators don't function properly if you complete tasks out of order. I'll admit, though, I don't have a better way to design the software and can work around this minor inconvenience.

The shared triage can't yet handle a shared mailbox from Microsoft or Google without its own user subscription which increases the cost to use that function. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The thing I like best about Karbon is its ability to simplify my inbox. Tagging emails to projects/recurring work makes it easier to stay on top of actionable emails, I can communicate internally with my team without a risk of a client seeing our correspondence, and I can see a paper trail of all action taken on an email.

Additionally, the time-tracking feature helps me determine how profitable our services were in a given work period, and where we may have spent time unnecessarily.

It has also significantly shortened our prospect-to-sale process and helped us automate other recurring work and document or internal processes. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

If I'm looking for a specific email, but it hasn't been tagged to a customer or piece of work, it can sometimes be more difficult to track it down in karbon than it is to track it down in Gmail. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The number of features is amazing. Karbon is the complete start to finish work flow manager allowing business owners to step away from the tools while keeping an eye on what is required for clients work to be completed, and what staff are working on.

Email triage is awesome to get rid of the clutter, and to assign emails to staff members.

Recurring work items allows us to never miss a deadline, and to allow us to predict staff shortages in times of high compliance. We can also bring forward due dates reflecting on staff members' work day, allowing smoothing of workload.

Checking on employee work load and reassigning work to staff during absenses.

Love love love having all emails for a client/or work in one place, visible to everyone. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Searching emails is a bit hit and miss.

I think it would be great if a client could be hidden from other staff members for privacy reasons, if required. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

We are a small practice just getting started and I love how complete the system is. We can do everything from email, create work, manage documents, track time & keep detailed client notes and information. I like to use as few softwares as possible and Karbon takes care of everything practice related. Our internal team doesn't need to switch between apps. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The only downsides I would say for right now:

1. It takes quite a bit of time to set up if you are starting from scratch. We started service in September and I expect we won't be ready to use the service fully until 1st of the new year.

2. It is a bit complex to see what work is due, but I imagine once we practice and get comfortable through out this year we will have it figured out by January.

In the long run, the time we're investing in the set up will be worth it next year. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I love that all of my processes are documented in one place and I can apply those processes to specific clients. It has made on-boarding and off boarding clients a breeze. Email templates save me a ton of time each day and I am able to know where we are at with each client at a glance. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

There are a lot of features and some I do not use. The triage needs work, it can be really confusing trying to find emails. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

We really depend on Karbon for our entire business and workflow management – we use it every day, all day. The software keeps getting better with new features, which really makes our work easier and more productive. It lets us work together as a team and within the whole company with notes, comments, and assignments. Our client communication has gotten a lot better. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

There are only a couple of small things that I would love to see implemented to make my experience with Karbon flow easier. But there isn't anything that would keep me from recommending this to other bookkeeping firms. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Karbon integrates with your email and lets you seemlessly track client communications alongside engagement notes and documents. It is the solution that you've been waiting for when you've thought "There's got to be a better way..." when it comes to dealing with client communication in general and the documentation thereof. Huge timesaver, well worth the cost. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I would like if there was a better view to see everything going on in terms of open projects. You can see them all, but I'd like it to be more condensed so I can see it at a glance. Full disclosure, maybe there is a good way to do this, I just haven't figured it out yet if so. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.