Rethinking email: How leading accounting firms are saving hours each week with Karbon

No matter the convenience and enhancements that tools like Slack bring to business, there may always be a handful of important reasons why email will prevail.

After all, as an accounting business, email is at the heart of your client relationships. Not only is it a universal communication medium, but most client inquiries still come through email first, and it’s used to share documents, kick-off jobs, provide updates and request more information.

But despite its persistence amongst the threats of Slack and Microsoft Teams, etc., email is far from perfect: it can be clunky, tiresome, and lacking in one of the most important necessities of running a successful accounting business: visibility.

But that’s where Karbon steps in.

All communication in one place—email included
Karbon directly integrates email into your workflow, enabling you to gain instant access to all communication about anything, internal and external, no matter who said it.

How leading accounting firms are saving time and boosting productivity with their emails in Karbon

1. Bring your emails directly into your workflow

With Karbon, there’s no need to spend time forwarding emails and copying information from emails into spreadsheets or a separate workflow tool. You can simply assign your emails directly to your colleagues for action, or to your work items for reference.

For example, let’s say you’ve received an email from a prospect, who has found your website and is ready to book a discovery call with you.

When that email lands in your Triage (your notifications hub in Karbon), you can:

• Create a new contact in Karbon

• Create a new piece of work from a template for that contact in Karbon

• Assign that piece of work to your Client Manager

• Attach an internal comment to the email and @ mention your Client Manager to notify them of a potential new client for action

All without navigating away from the email itself.

2. Gain clarity and visibility with ease

Karbon is designed to provide you with the ability to effectively manage your accounting firm, including your team and clients. And this is difficult to do when you don’t have visibility across your firm. 

This is one of the biggest pitfalls of a traditional email provider, like Gmail and Outlook—you simply can’t easily see when a client was last emailed.

But by integrating your email with Karbon, you can see all client and project-related communication, both via email and via internal and external comments within Karbon.

3. Streamline and consolidate your workflows

With Karbon, you don’t need to constantly flip between your inbox, your to-do list and your workflow management tool.

Triage is your supercharged inbox.

This is where you can find all your notifications and emails, and just like the name suggests, this is where you triage your emails, tasks, and notes by assigning them to the right job, colleague and/ or prioritize them exactly how you need.

Plus, eliminating noise in your Triage is simple. Take that weekly industry newsletter that you haven’t opened in four weeks, for example. Rather than letting it clog your Triage, simply mark one as ‘Low Priority’ and each one after will be sent to your Low Priority section in Triage, so you can get to it when you want and without it adding to the anxieties of a backed up stack of emails.

4. Say goodbye to the client chase

When you use Karbon, you don’t need to manually email clients to request information and then set a reminder to chase them for that information.

This whole process is handled with Client Tasks within your workflow. Simply set them up and let Karbon do the chasing.

Tip: You don’t have to set them up from scratch if you use a pre-created and customizable work template from the Karbon Template Library.

And better yet, if you have recurring work—say monthly reconciliations—you can create a repeating work item in Karbon that is created monthly (or whenever you’d like) that automatically sends Client Tasks to kick-start the work (so you don’t have to set reminders or even take the time to compose and send the email).

5. Stop falling victim to the ‘inbox trap’

Because Karbon integrates your email into your workflow, there’s no need to use your inbox as a to-do list. 

Triage is designed to allow you to assign emails and notifications to the appropriate pieces of work or colleagues quickly, so you can get back to high value work, like serving your clients, growing your business, or even spending more time with your family.

Recommended reading: How Karbon released Tabworks from 'email jail'

Rethink your inbox

While email may never die, that doesn’t mean its pitfalls should just be accepted.

There’s a smarter way to run your accounting firm, and that’s with Karbon.

Steamline, clarify and improve visibility across your workflows, stop chasing clients, and free yourself from your inbox.