How Platform Accounting Group scaled financial visibility across 50+ firms with Karbon Billing & Payments

Tyson Chapman is the President and COO of Platform Accounting Group, a next-generation firm founded in 2015 on a simple premise: preserve the relationships and culture of boutique local firms while providing the resources, technology, and support of an enterprise.

Today, Platform supports more than 50 offices across the United States, each operating under its own bespoke, local brand and serving its own community, connected through a shared operational infrastructure.

Because part of Platform's business model involves acquisitions, the central office is constantly onboarding newly acquired firms onto common systems. Integrated technology, clean data, and strong reporting has always been an extremely high priority for Platform. As such, they had been working with Karbon for workflow management in a number of units, but as Karbon’s Billing & Payments launched, they saw the opportunity to take that investment to another level.

In a business that thrives on clean data and visibility—and is also committed to using AI efficiently and to support and grow these firms—bringing it all into one platform has been transformational.

The challenge: Dozens of firms, dozens of disconnected billing systems

Before Karbon, Platform was dealing with a lot of local firms with different billing systems that came with them. Each acquired firm had its own QuickBooks instance, its own practice management tool, and its own invoicing workflow. 

Some offices were already on Karbon; others used WorkStream, spreadsheets, or legacy desktop platforms they had run the same way for decades. Billing happened after the work was done in a separate system, with no unified view of production, collections, or pricing across the portfolio.

Getting any meaningful analysis out of the business meant exporting data, cleaning it manually, and rebuilding it in Excel. There was no easy way to compare year-over-year pricing across units, monitor whether client owners were holding their rates, or see in real time which offices were falling behind.

The solution: Billing from the same system where work is tracked

Platform had been working on unifying and building an infrastructure that supported all of the firms in their ecosystem, and billing was the next frontier to tackle. So the decision to consolidate billing into the same platform was a natural extension. 

Rolling out Karbon Billing & Payments across all its offices meant connecting it to a custom NetSuite integration for downstream financial reporting and GL account tracking. Every acquired firm would now run time, billing, and payments from a single system.

« There's so much value in having it all in one spot. You can't operate and manage at scale if you're trying to bridge across dispersed systems, and without clean, accurate data. »

The impact: Visibility, accountability, and a scalable billing engine

Unlocking data-driven decisions across every office

Perhaps the most significant outcome has been the shift from gut-feel management to data-backed decision making. Using Karbon Analytics, Platform built a Snowflake data warehouse integration that pulls Karbon's production and billing data into Power BI dashboards, giving Tyson and the operations team a consolidated, real-time view across every unit. 

Platform can now drill from portfolio level all the way down to an individual client owner, tracking outstanding AR, unbilled WIP, billing rates, and year-over-year revenue performance for all 50+ firms. 

Every director and manager looks at the same dashboards and is held accountable for the performance of their book of business.

« Karbon provides critical visibility all the way down through our leadership. »

The firm runs annual pricing analyses by unit, supported by real-time dashboards tracking pricing by client owner and service line. Platform also uses engagement-level budgets to monitor margin. 

"Because we want our individual client owners to own and drive pricing decisions, we've got to create accountability and a metric-based approach," Tyson explains. "Before, it was a lot of gut feeling. Now we have data to back it up."

Accelerating collections and converting WIP to AR faster

Platform has seen measurable improvement in DSO and collections since moving to Karbon, supported by a custom NetSuite dunning workflow that layers on top of Karbon's invoicing. As offices have adopted the platform more comprehensively, the speed of converting WIP to AR has improved noticeably.

“As offices are adopting and starting to see the power of Karbon, we are seeing great improvement," Tyson said. "It's creating amazing momentum."

Advice for firms considering the switch to Karbon

« I would fully recommend the transition to Karbon. The flexibility to do different types of invoices is key: fixed fee, time and billing, etc. Because everything is tied directly to the workflow, we’ve gained the visibility necessary to help us run and scale our business. »

For firms already using Karbon for workflow, Tyson's case is straightforward: "If you already have your production in Karbon, why have billing somewhere else? Having it all in one platform provides you much better visibility on critical business metrics."

But he's equally emphatic that implementation requires proper project management and commitment. 

His advice: Dedicate an internal team on managing the change and ensuring continuous education: "We have a central team that drives training and onboarding of Karbon. As new firms join our group, they get regular training from the team so everyone uses Karbon correctly and maintains data integrity."

Key Karbon features that made the difference

• Flexible billing models: Support for time and materials, fixed fee, and recurring billing in a single system, eliminating the need for parallel tools across a diverse portfolio of firms.

• Integrated time and billing: Production tracked in Karbon flows directly into billing runs, eliminating the manual handoff between practice management and invoicing that previously slowed every office.

• NetSuite/ERP integration: API-based integration routes invoice and transaction data into NetSuite for consolidated financial reporting and GL account tracking by service line.

• Automated performance analytics: Production and billing data flows into Platform's Snowflake data warehouse, powering Power BI dashboards for real-time visibility into pricing, WIP, AR, and profitability across every office.

• Engagement-level budgets: Budget tracking at the engagement level supports margin monitoring and data-backed performance conversations with client owners.

Key results

• 50+ acquired firms consolidated onto a single workflow and billing platform

• Elimination of fragmented QuickBooks-per-firm billing workflows across all offices

• 35 hours per month saved on billing in certain offices

• Real-time executive dashboards tracking WIP, AR, pricing, and production across the entire portfolio

• Annual pricing analyses run by unit, with real-time dashboards for in-year monitoring

• Measurable improvement in DSO and collections

• Birdseye view of billing data throughout the whole firm to make data-driven recommendations and optimizations for the organization at large