What we shipped: The first half of 2025 in review

The first half of 2025 was another big one for Karbon. We started off with a series of Karbon AI updates, followed by a whole lot of other practice management enhancements and updates, and marked the mid-point of the year with the first of many tax workflow features.

I had the privilege of presenting the product keynote at Karbon Next 2025, where I unveiled the biggest updates coming to Karbon in the next six months and beyond. This is where we revealed the next evolution of practice management: practice intelligence. You can catch up on the key learnings from Karbon Next 2025.

For now, here’s a summary of all the major #KarbonUpdates from January to June in 2025.

Tax workflows

In June, we officially launched the first of many new features designed to support complex, deadline-driven processes—like those found in tax and other high-volume service areas.

First-In First-Out (FIFO) queues

Karbon now supports FIFO queue-based workflows, allowing you to manage and complete tasks in the order they arrive. You can configure queue settings, add work to queues, and manage them from new Kanban board dashboards and list views, and within My Week.

Tax extensions

A new attribute for tax extension workflows allows you to track, filter, and automate deadline changes, reducing the risk of late filings and missed steps.

Conditional workflows

Sections in work items and templates can now be activated or deactivated manually or via automators, making workflows more flexible and better tailored to each client’s needs. This is especially useful for managing optional processes, such as tax extensions, within a single, standardized template.

ℹ️ Dive deeper into these features

And we’re not stopping here. eSignature KBA, tax organizers, and IRS transcript integrations are all on our roadmap to be delivered so you can run your perfect tax firm with Karbon.

Billing & Payments updates

Karbon’s billing and payments features continue to evolve, giving firms greater visibility, flexibility, and control.

Engagements (Early Access)

One of the most-requested enhancements to Karbon Billing & Payments is the addition of a proposal and engagement solution that enables Karbon to manage your firm's end-to-end customer lifecycle. 

With Karbon Engagements, you can create customizable engagement letters, connect work and engagements to track scope, bill and get paid automatically, and renew confidently with AI in one platform. 

If you’d like to participate in the early testing of Engagements and help shape its future feature development, register your interest.

Rate plans

Rate plans provides a streamlined approach to managing billing rates across roles, task types, and colleagues. You can define role-based rates from specific start dates, maintain a clear history of rate changes, automatically apply appropriate rates to budgets and time entries based on configurable rules tied to work start or due dates, and centralize your rate management.

Rate plans

Collect on imported AR and apply credit notes

You can now import your open invoice and credit note data from another billing tool to Karbon, helping you to help you onboard and migrate unpaid invoices and credit notes to Karbon with ease. This allows you to have full client balances in Karbon to manage payments from one system. 

You can also collect payments on these imported, open invoices and apply credit notes to future invoices to ensure every dollar is accounted for in Karbon during the transition.

Void credit notes

You can now void a previously issued credit note to reverse any mistakes made on that credit note, such as accidentally giving it to the wrong client.

Reverse manual payments to maintain an audit trail

Reverse manual payments directly within Karbon Billing, allowing you to correct errors—such as bounced checks—while preserving the original transaction for reporting and compliance.

Secure payment links to collect or save client payment details

You can now generate a secure payment link to directly collect or add saved client payment details. Once the details are saved, future invoices will be paid automatically on their due date. These saved details can also be used with Quick Collect to process payments instantly when needed.

Karbon AI updates

With communication still the number one AI use case for accounting professionals, Karbon AI is making it easier for customers to summarize work and quickly reply to emails.

Compose emails faster 

You can now draft and refine emails with customizable options for tone, length, and language, streamlining communication with clients. The ability to generate multiple versions allows you to select the best option for each interaction.  

Easier inbox management

With Quick Replies, clearing routine emails from your inbox is now as simple as choosing from a number of suggested responses, so you can engage with your clients at pace.

Quick Replies in Karbon

Work conversation and client summaries

Keep track of projects and client relationships with summaries of the most recent updates for each work item or client. 

Smart Suggestions

Contact and work timeline suggestions

When linking an email to a timeline, Karbon AI will suggest work in progress associated with the email’s contacts or other relevant contacts

Assign colleague suggestions

When assigning a colleague to an email, Karbon AI will suggest teammates based on their involvement in related in-progress or recurring work for that client.

New integrations

It’s all about creating the most connected ecosystem for a seamless experience across your tech stack. 

Xero integration

A new two-way contact sync between Karbon and Xero makes it easier to manage client information by importing Xero contacts, resolving partial matches, and syncing updates across systems with one click. This is the first of many parts of the integration. Next up: invoice sync. Join the beta program to help shape this feature.

HubSpot integration

Sync client data automatically into Karbon for more efficient client management and onboarding, including less manual data entry and more automated lead-to-client transitions.

QuickBooks Online Accountant (QBOA) integration

You can now adopt two-way contact and payment syncs with QBOA, leveraging end-to-end data synchronization so you can bill in context and make informed billing decisions. The ability to record and delete manual payments gives you flexibility, while maintaining your audit trail.

👉 Live demo: Bill in-context and reach AR zero with Karbon’s QBOA integration

Google Drive integration

Connect your Google Drive folders to work and contacts in Karbon to save time and improve team collaboration.

ℹ️ Explore Karbon’s 2025 integrations roadmap

New Karbon Practice Intelligence (KPI) dashboards

Billing dashboard

The Billing dashboard in KPI helps you better visualize and understand your firm’s Work-in-Progress (WIP), Accounts Receivable (AR), and Realization reporting. You can drill down and slice the data by client, client owner, and client manager to perform more granular and in-depth analysis.

WIP AR Reconciliation in the Billing dashboard

Revenue dashboard

The Revenue dashboard in KPI combines invoice, credit note, and payment data from Karbon Billing and Payments to provide real-time visibility into your firm’s financial performance. It ties WIP balances to ongoing work, revealing the state of invoices between approved and posted.

Revenue dashboard

New client portal and contact management enhancements

Karbon is delivering new features to optimize the client experience, driving stronger engagement and more tailored services.

Karbon for Clients: A premium client portal

Karbon for Clients is the new, branded portal where you can collaborate and exchange documents with your clients, without the chase. It’s a simple, secure way to organize, action, and keep track of client tasks.

With Karbon for Clients, you can keep your clients informed with progress updates and automated alerts, simplify the signing and approval process, and reach clients effortlessly via email, push notifications, or in-app notifications via the Karbon for Clients app, which your clients can download from the Google Play Store or App Store.

Karbon for Clients

Custom contact fields

Custom fields for contacts make it easier to deliver personalized services to clients by keeping essential client data organized, accessible, and usable.

They are particularly powerful when used with contact segments in Karbon, allowing you to build individual client lists based on select custom field data.

For example: if you created a Communication Preference custom field and applied it to every People contact, you can then build a custom client segment named Email Preference to generate a list of clients who prefer to be contacted only by email.

It’s all about flexibility and control over your client data. 

Segments in Karbon

Contact prioritization

Assign priority levels to your contacts and filter your contact list accordingly, helping you to easily focus on those high-value clients and make informed decisions based on priority. By default, priority levels are low, medium, and high, but are fully customizable.

Improved contact permissions

Three granular permissions were added for contact management, giving you greater control over who in your team can create, edit, and delete contacts. This serves as an extra layer of security to ensure that only authorized team members can make changes to critical contact data.

Document management enhancements

Send eSignature and Approval requests to colleagues

You can now add colleagues as signers in your eSignature and Approval workflow, making internal collaboration simpler. This means you can send eSignature or Approval requests to multiple parties, receive signature request notifications in Triage, and use Approvals for internal workflows.

Manage documents on client contacts

A new Documents tab was added to every People and Organizations contact to help you manage files at a client level using both Karbon Storage (native document management) and Connected Folders (via DropBox, SharePoint/Microsoft 365, or Google Drive).

Improved Connected Folder experience with SharePoint/Microsoft 365

Quick SharePoint/Microsoft 365 site selection: When connecting to your SharePoint account, a new search box will appear to make it easy to connect to the right SharePoint site.

Seamless SharePoint/Microsoft 365 access: Open documents from Connected Folders directly in SharePoint for quick viewing and editing.

Connected Folders in Karbon

Other notable enhancements

• You can view and action Shared Triage emails directly from your Karbon mobile app, helping teams stay on top of SLAs and improve service delivery.

• Update the assignee for multiple repeating work items in bulk with the flexibility to decide whether to reassign individual items or the entire schedule.

• ‘Done’ was renamed to ‘Cleared’ in My Week, better reflecting how your work and tasks move through Karbon, acknowledging that while something may be off your plate for now, it’s not necessarily finished. 

• Cleared items will return to ‘This Week’ if they’re reassigned, updated, or reopened, keeping work flowing without anything slipping through the cracks.

• Logging time is now easier and more accurate with search available in Role and Task Type.

• You can now send invoices to multiple recipients at once, significantly reducing the admin time and work needed to get invoices to the right people.