5 ways Karbon helps your accounting firm increase revenue (without working harder)

When it comes to increasing revenue, the instinct is often to pursue more clients or put in longer hours. But a simpler and more effective strategy is to optimize workflows that are causing slow but steady revenue leaks.

Manual time-tracking loses billable hours. Arbitrary billing cycles create unnecessary cashflow delays. Outdated payment methods add security risks and AR write-offs.

While winning new clients is important, you can start optimizing what you already have and making the most of it right away.

Karbon's practice management platform offers five effective ways to help your firm work smarter and capture more revenue, without adding more clients or working longer days.

How to increase your accounting firm’s revenue with Karbon

1. Use AI suggested time entries to capture more billable time

Tracking billable time accurately is challenging with the constant task-switching and deadline pressure.

This means that when you’re ready to bill clients, you're reconstructing days (if not weeks) of billable activities from memory, and hoping you fully captured everything.

Karbon's AI-powered time suggestions solve this by helping you remember and capture more of your billable work, automatically. When you complete a task, send an email, or update a work item, Karbon suggests time entries already mapped to the right client, work item, and activity.

Suggested time entries in Karbon are AI-powered based on your activity

You simply review the suggestions and make changes as needed. For a mid-sized firm, recovering even 5% of lost time can translate to hundreds of thousands in additional annual revenue.

2. Trigger billing the moment work gets done

One of the biggest revenue leaks in accounting firms happens in the gap between completing work and sending an invoice.

Work can sit unbilled for weeks or months, which not only delays cash flow but also increases write-offs when clients question charges for work they can’t remember. Karbon's workflow automation closes this gap by letting your billing team know right away when and what they should bill.

'Ready to Bill' Kanban board in Karbon

With workflow automators, work statuses can be automatically changed to ’Ready to Bill’ and assigned to your billing admin when all the billable tasks are completed.

You can also set up a Billing dashboard in Karbon to track progress of all billable work:

• Dashboard name: Ready to Bill

• Filters: Status = Ready to Bill (50%); Ready to Bill; <Other ready to bill statuses>

• Columns sorted by: Assignee

The result is faster billing cycles, improved cash flow, and fewer awkward client conversations about old invoices.

3. Collect payment details upfront

Collecting client payment details before work begins is an effective strategy to make sure you get paid for what you do consistently.

Karbon enables you to collect your client’s payment details upfront as part of the client engagement and onboarding workflow. Take a tour of exactly how.

Collect payment upfront in Karbon

With this option built into your client engagements and onboarding process, you can reduce payment friction significantly and improve cash flow with every client moving forward.

4. Set it and forget it with automated recurring billing and payments

Automating your billing workflow for recurring fixed fee services like monthly bookkeeping and payroll is the fastest way to gain back billable time and get paid faster.

Karbon's recurring billing capability puts your recurring revenue on auto-pilot. Set up a recurring engagement once, and Karbon generates the pre-approved invoices on your schedule.

Recurring Billing in Karbon Engagements

When paired with auto-pay and saved client payment details, every recurring invoice will be automatically paid on the invoice due date. This transforms recurring revenue from an administrative burden into a reliable, automated income stream that requires only minimal oversight.

5. Use realization data to optimize your client portfolio

Do you know who your most profitable clients are? Without actual data, it's impossible to know. But when you do know, you can confidently articulate the types of clients you want more of (vs. the types you want to let go of).

When you bill in Karbon, you can better identify your high-margin clients by comparing billed time and fees to recorded fees through built-in realization reporting.

Realization Dashboard in Karbon

You can see clearly which clients are delivering healthy margins and which are weighing you down.

With this intelligence, you can make strategic decisions about your client portfolio—be it raising fees for high-maintenance clients, or gracefully ending engagements that aren't serving your firm.

Start capturing more revenue today

You don't have to win more clients or work longer hours to increase revenue. You can get there by optimizing what's already happening at your firm.

Karbon helps you get paid for the work you're already doing, improve cash flow, and have more profitable clients you enjoy working with.

If you are already a Karbon customer, join our expert-led, live Billing & Payments onboarding workshop to get started.

If you are new to Karbon, book a demo to see how Karbon can help you run a smarter, more profitable firm.