How Virtus Advisory Services improved billing efficiency by 40% with Karbon Billing & Payments

Virtus Group has been part of the Canadian accounting landscape for more than 60 years. When the firm noticed a gap—clients who got clear financial pictures once a year at tax time, but little visibility in between—it created Virtus Advisory Services to fill it. 

That division has grown from one person to a team of 17, delivering bookkeeping, controller, and payroll services to clients across Canada.

Alison Grieman, Senior Advisor, leads operations for the division. She joined the firm as a controller. Running a scaling advisory practice wasn't the original plan, but it's where she landed—and she's built the infrastructure to support it.

The challenge: Too many systems, not enough visibility

By the time Virtus Advisory Services was ready to look for a practice management tool, the team was running on a tangle of disconnected software. 

Time tracking meant logging into the parent firm's network—slow enough that most of the team defaulted to Excel. Task management lived in ClickUp, which worked until the client load grew and confidence in it started to erode.

Email was unmanageable, and transitioning clients between team members meant relying on memory or long internal threads. Performance measurement was limited to hours billed, which told Alison almost nothing about what her team was actually delivering.

"We really didn't have a metric outside Excel for capacity planning,” explains Alison. “It was all just based on time entry, which as a culture, we don’t want to necessarily rely on to measure output or performance.”

What Alison wanted was a way to measure the things that actually mattered: task completion, overdue work, budget vs. actual. And she wanted all client information, process documentation, and communication in one place.

The solution: The right tool and a careful rollout

Alison didn't rush the move to Karbon. In fact, she allowed six months for implementation. 

"I led the charge and I am an accountant, not a workflow operations person. So we took our time, which allowed me time to 100% buy-in and know that it was the right decision."

Once she was confident, she started preparing the team well before launch day: several full-team meetings, demos, and clear explanations of what was changing.

Some of the team at Virtus Advisory Services

Change management as a leadership discipline

Like any serious change, implementing Karbon had its challenges. Alison welcomed the feedback from the team, ensuring they felt heard and understood.

She checked in with everyone one-on-one, and called out early wins and shared them with the group. The message, consistently, was: give it time, it will be worth it.

One formal training session with a Karbon specialist proved to be a turning point:

"It was an hour and a half with the whole team and it was the best. That session is still the number one resource that everybody uses.”

Today, Alison keeps adoption strong through weekly best-practice meetings. She credits the template and workflow features as the cornerstone of how the firm now operates.

« We're at the point that we probably couldn't live without Karbon. We've grown to that level where we cannot operate with information just living in everybody's head. »

The impact: Faster collections and cleaner billing

Karbon Billing & Payments has had a clear impact on how—and how quickly—Virtus Advisory Services gets paid. 

The old billing process was manual and hard to analyze because it captured only a lump of monthly hours per client. Now, billing is attached to individual work items, scope creep is easier to catch, and online payments have shortened collection time meaningfully.

« Our collections are faster with Karbon. We collect probably 20% of our AR within 20 days. I don't know what it used to be before because we were never able to measure it. »

The team now spends roughly 60% of the time on billing that they used to. And that's with only partial adoption—features like automatic billing and engagement management are still being rolled out, paced deliberately to avoid change fatigue.

Templates: The unexpected cornerstone

When Alison first implemented Karbon, she assumed the Triage email management feature would be the headline win. And it was. But over time, something else has become just as central to how the firm operates.

« Karbon templates and the workflows are essential to standardization and onboarding new clients and new team members. »

Before Karbon, Virtus Advisory Services had no formal standard operating procedures. Processes lived in people's heads, and quality varied depending on who was doing the work. Templates haven't replaced SOPs exactly, but for a firm that was starting from scratch, they've served a similar function.

“Now everyone—clients and staff—understands what's expected of them, no matter who they're working with within the team,” shares Alison.

Discover 400+ accounting workflow templates

The results: A solid foundation

Alison doesn't reach for a single headline figure when describing ROI, partly because the firm couldn't measure most things before Karbon, and partly because she understands that the real value for them right now is structural.

« Now, we do more quality work because we’ve standardized our process and centralized our technology with Karbon. »

Delegation now has an infrastructure behind it. Capacity is visible. Decisions about onboarding new clients are based on data, rather than instinct.

"The barrier to delegation is trust, so having everything in Karbon alleviates some of that sweatiness that people get when they want to delegate."

Karbon Analytics has become part of Alison's own month-end process. She uses it to understand WIP, track how time is being spent, and analyze client profitability in ways she simply couldn't before.

The firm is hiring an operations coordinator—a role that will be built, in large part, around owning Karbon. That's the measure of how embedded it has become.

What's next for Virtus Advisory Services?

Virtus Advisory Services is targeting 20% growth this year. Alison is clear-eyed about what that requires: the right people, and the infrastructure to bring them up-to-speed without breaking everything else.

The new operations coordinator role is part of that. So is the continued rollout of Karbon features they've been pacing toward—automatic billing, engagement management, deeper use of capacity planning tools.

But the goal, underneath all of it, is simpler than any feature list:

"I'm most excited to continue to provide financial clarity and create long-lasting client relationships. The relationships and trust that we build, and the peace of mind that we provide to our clients is just as valuable as the actual numbers that we're providing."

Key results

• 40% reduction in time spent on billing

• 20% of AR collected within 20 days

• Complete process standardization