Across your practice, Karbon works in several connected ways:

1. Help onboard clients efficiently with Engagements (early access)

2. Manage client email and communication in Triage

3. Standardize recurring services and track work across the firm

4. Track time and budgets against the work as it happens

5. Manage client requests, documents, approvals, and signatures

6. Run period close by exception with Karbon + Aider

7. Connect engagements with work, billing, and payments (early access)

8. See capacity, work status, and profitability through Karbon Analytics

What Karbon doesn’t do

Karbon isn't a general project management tool designed to be used by a broad range of businesses across different professions. 

Karbon is built for accounting and bookkeeping firms, which means not only is the product specifically designed for how firms operate, but the customer support is too.

Karbon isn’t your general ledger, but it does integrate with them, including QuickBooks Online, Xero, and Digits (coming soon).

Why connected AI-powered practice management matters now

According to Karbon’s ‘The Future of Client Trust in the Age of AI’ report, clients expect AI to be a part of the service they receive from their accountant, and more than a third believe AI will lead tax planning within two years.

In fact, 81% said they would view their accountant as more valuable if they used AI to handle the majority of routine work and reinvested that time into monthly strategy calls.

Clients want their accountants to use AI if it means more strategy calls with them

The same pressure is showing up in firm value and talent.

Karbon’s 'The State of AI in Accounting 2026' report found that 63% of accounting professionals believe a firm’s value drops if it does not use AI, and 91% believe that graduates are more likely to join accounting firms that actively use Al and other advanced technologies.

AI is well and truly embedded within the accounting profession. The trouble is, there are a growing number of AI point solutions that promise efficiency improvements, yet consistently underdeliver. This is because these point solutions lack context.

That’s where AI-powered practice management comes in.

Practice management is where accounting firms already run the work. It holds client records, work history, team activity, and communication that a general AI tool has to be fed manually every time. 

Karbon gives AI that context by keeping the firm’s work and knowledge in one place.

How Karbon works

Onboard clients and plan work with Engagements

Availability: Karbon Engagements will be available to all customers on Oct 5, 2026. It requires Karbon Billing & Payments for automated invoicing and collection.

Karbon Engagements lets firms create and send custom client proposals and engagement letters that outline the services, pricing, billing schedule, terms and conditions, and collect payment details up front. 

After the client signs, Karbon turns the signed agreement into assigned work and repeating schedules with billing and payments already connected. Fixed-fee and time-and-materials services can sit on the same engagement.

For firms that want smooth transitions and minimal context-switching across agreement signing, client onboarding, work scheduling, invoicing, and recurring payments, Engagements is the ideal solution that connects every part of the client lifecycle in one platform.

Send client-ready proposals in minutes with Karbon Engagements

Email management with Triage

Triage is Karbon's email inbox, built directly into the platform. 

A client email in Triage can be assigned to a staff member, discussed through internal comments, added to existing work, or turned into a task. Because Triage is built into Karbon, the message also appears on the client's timeline, giving everyone who works with that client the same communication history.

An email might contain a document, a change in scope, or the answer that gets a job moving again. Triage lets the work move forward without someone forwarding the thread and re-explaining the whole story.

Shared Triage extends the same handling to firm addresses like info@ or tax@, and Delegate Triage allows someone else to manage your inbox, such as an EA.

Triage connects email and workflow to improve visibility and efficiency across your firm

Today, Karbon saves each employee 3.2 hours per week reading, actioning and searching for email.

Before Karbon, Bette Hochberger, Founder and Managing Director of Bette Hochberger CPA felt overwhelmed by her email inbox. 

"I absolutely love Triage,” she explains. “My inbox used to be a dumpster fire. But now that I have implemented Karbon and started using Triage, I'm able to go through my emails quickly and make sure that all my client information is organized to the right client and the right piece of work.”

Now with AI Triage labels, Karbon AI can help automatically categorize, label, and action emails for you. 

Workflow automation and project management

Once an email becomes work, your team can move it into a defined workflow in Karbon. 

Your firm can build work templates for onboarding, tax, payroll, bookkeeping, or advisory work, with tasks, owners, due dates, and client requests set in advance. The team can then see who owns the work and what happens next.

Automators handle the parts nobody should be doing manually, recurring work is generated on schedule, and client reminders are automatically sent on the dates you define.

Kanban boards and firm-wide work dashboard views show where every job stands, helping to identify bottlenecks and manage capacity before issues arise.

View and manage capacity in Karbon with work dashboards

My Week gives each person a focused view of their own email, tasks, and assigned work, while managers can see deadlines and workloads across the team.

Templates in Karbon also act as your documented standard operating procedures (SOPs), ensuring processes and client experiences remain consistent, and empowering new staff to easily follow your firm’s processes.

Thanks to workflow templates in Karbon, Canadian bookkeeping firm Tabworks was able to slash the time it takes to start delivering work for a new client by 80%, from about a month to just five days. 

“Previously, we didn’t have a formal training process,” explains Tabworks owner, Tabatha Morrison. “But now, we have this amazing workflow based on a Karbon preset staff onboarding template and then we just personalized it. I feel like we set up our new hires for massive success and they work more competently now.”

Client portal and document management

Karbon for Clients is Karbon’s client portal, which gives clients a secure place to pay invoices, complete requests, upload files, sign documents, and respond to your team. Those interactions connect to the relevant client and work item in Karbon, so you can see what still needs a follow-up.

Karbon for Clients is designed to elevate your service delivery for premium client experiences

Automators handle those reminders for you. Then, what the client sends back is automatically attached to the work item it belongs to, so nobody re-saves an attachment or updates a tracker to show the file arrived.

eSignatures work the same way. You can prepare a document for signature and send it to multiple signatories through a secure link, and the status changes against the job so you can see who has opened it and who has signed.

Karbon also provides native document storage and integrations with document management tools including Google Drive, OneDrive, and Dropbox, for firms that keep their files stored elsewhere.

Period close automation with Karbon + Aider

Aider Period Close Automation runs recurring checks across clients in QuickBooks Online and Xero, then flags the transactions that need attention, eliminating the need to manually check every transaction.

The checks catch reconciliation gaps, 1099 vendors still missing a W-9, and other tasks a senior reviewer would otherwise work through client-by-client. 

A dashboard shows close progress and outstanding items across the client base, and the AI Rule Builder also turns a check described in plain English into a rule your team can review and adjust.

Karbon acquired Aider in September 2025. Close checks, dashboards, checklists, close templates, the AI Rule Builder, Client Questions, and AI Document Validation are available today, with more updates releasing frequently.

Aider can be used as a standalone product to make use of the month-end close automation and AI-powered advisory. But the true power is when Aider is used alongside Karbon. This allows firms to take advantage of the existing data and context within Karbon to help enrich and streamline period close.

Close faster with period close automation connected to your practice management

Time tracking, billing, and payments

In Karbon, time and budgets are tracked against work items or clients. Your firm can set a budget in hours or dollars for a job, log time on the work item or client page rather than in a separate app, and see which jobs are on track and which are heading over budget before the invoice is written.

Karbon Billing & Payments supports invoicing, payments, and collections.

For time-based work, Karbon Billing uses recorded time entries to automatically populate invoice data. Billing admins can write up, down, or carry forward WIP as needed. 

For fixed fee work, Karbon Billing uses the fees set for each project to automatically populate the invoices and billing admins can make adjustments as needed from there.

Because Karbon Billing is connected to the time and budgets related to the work, your team has less information to re-enter or reconcile each month. Karbon supports however a firm bills, including fixed-fee, recurring fixed-fee, time-and-materials, and progress billing.

Platform Accounting Group consolidated billing across 50+ acquired firms into Karbon, and President and COO Tyson Chapman explains the power of running 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."

Reporting and analytics with Karbon Analytics

Karbon Analytics gives partners, managers, and operations leaders a firm-wide view of performance. 

It pulls from the work already happening in Karbon, including email, work items, client requests, invoices, time, budgets, WIP, revenue, and AR, instead of making the team assemble those numbers in a spreadsheet.

Karbon Analytics empowers decision making with your own data

More than a dozen dashboards show where work is falling behind, who has capacity, and which services or clients are profitable. Portfolio Operations reporting adds another layer by showing how work, time, communication, and capacity affect performance across the firm. 

Custom and AI-powered analytics are coming to the platform soon, as well as the option to import and report on data from other sources outside of Karbon, like compensation data, for example. 

AI across the practice with Karbon AI and Kai

Availability: Karbon AI is available now. Kai and agentic workflows are in early access. AI-powered analytics and AI Notetaker are coming soon.

Karbon AI is available today for tasks such as drafting emails, refining responses, summarizing conversations, and suggesting contact assignments based on previous work. 

It also pulls a client brief together from emails, notes, work, and billing data, and flags time entries you missed. Karbon firms save, on average, 2.9 hours per employee each week thanks to Karbon AI.

Kai: The AI coworker that knows your firm and works as part of your team

Kai, Karbon's AI coworker, and agentic workflows are currently in early access. 

Kai can provide daily briefings and client summaries, answer questions about work status using real firm data, and surface what needs attention.

Agentic workflows handle defined tasks such as timesheet review and work prioritization—multi-step work that runs inside the processes your firm already uses, using your own procedures and client context.

Your firm sets the guardrails, including what each agent can do. Every agent action is routed for review, where it can be approved, edited, or rejected before execution.

Underpinning all of Karbon’s AI features is the context it needs to be truly powerful: your firm's clients, work, teams, and communication.

More AI capabilities are arriving in stages. AI-powered analytics, AI Meeting Notetaker, and a public Model Context Protocol (MCP) server will be released soon.

Who is Karbon built for?

Karbon is built for growing accounting firms—from startup practices with a few employees, to scaling firms with expanding teams, to regional firms with multiple offices and locations—that want to standardize how work moves through the firm and scale without adding headcount at the same rate.

Karbon is frequently chosen by accounting firm leaders who are fed up with losing time, margin, and visibility to a fragmented tech stack and manual admin work.

Growing firms standardizing operations

At some point, a firm stops being a group of generalists who each own a client end-to-end, and starts forming departments. To do that successfully, and in a way that scales, a process that once lived in a few people's heads needs to become a process anyone can follow. 

For example, with Karbon, work templates turn each recurring engagement into the same repeatable sequence, so a new hire can run a monthly close according to the firm’s documented process.

Karbon customer example

mAccounting
21–50 employees
USA
Bookkeeping, Tax, Advisory
Discover how mAccounting found their single source of truth with Karbon

Multi-service firms coordinating tax, CAS, and advisory

Once attestation, bookkeeping, payroll, tax, and advisory sit in separate teams, the risk moves to the handoffs. Karbon keeps email, tasks, documents, and decisions attached to the client and the job, so every team has visibility over blockers and double-handling is eliminated.

Karbon customer example

Sanford & Associates
11–20 employees
USA
Tax, Accounting, Payroll, Financial Planning, New Business & Acquisition Services
Discover how Sanford & Associates built a more accountable and empowered firm

Partners and ops leaders who want visibility

Karbon Analytics pulls email, work items, client requests, and invoices into more than a dozen dashboards covering work status, capacity, time, budgets, WIP, revenue, and AR aging.

This means a partner can see which jobs are falling behind and who has room to take more on, then compare profitability by service or client without assembling the numbers in a spreadsheet first.

Karbon customer example

Armanino
250+ employees
USA
Audit, Tax, Business Management, Consulting
Discover how Armanino’s Business Management department is using Karbon for greater visibility and accountability

Large firms with multiple teams and offices

Karbon is built for accounting firms running work across multiple teams and offices. Open APIs and integrations provide firms with true flexibility to connect the best-in-breed tools the team prefers. 

And a data layer turns a firm's numbers into real reporting, AI runs through every workflow, and everything is protected with enterprise-grade security.

Karbon customer example

VIDEN Group
51–250 employees
Australia & India
Accounting, Tax, Audit, Virtual CFO Services, Financial Planning
Discover how VIDEN Group obtained visibility across their five offices

Frequently asked questions

Is Karbon accounting software?

No, Karbon is accounting practice management software. It runs the firm, not the books. 

Your general ledger, tax preparation, and payroll stay in the tools built for them, while Karbon manages the clients, work, communication, documents, time, billing, and reporting around them.

Does Karbon replace my accounting or tax software?

No, Karbon does not replace your accounting ledger, tax preparation software, or other specialist systems. 

Karbon connects the practice around them through 80+ native integrations, including QuickBooks Online and Xero, so firms can keep the specialist systems they need while running the broader practice from one connected platform.

Is Karbon hard to learn?

Karbon is built around how accounting firms already work, so your team doesn’t need to invent an accounting workflow from scratch. 

Karbon includes accounting-specific workflows, templates, dashboards, and client communication tools that reflect how tax, bookkeeping, CAS, advisory, and billing work actually move through a firm.

For a small team, the biggest shift is usually centralizing work that used to live in inboxes, spreadsheets, and individual task lists. For a larger firm, the bigger lift is standardizing processes across teams and offices.

In both cases, the payoff is the same: less work hidden in personal inboxes, fewer status meetings, and a clearer view of what needs attention.

How does Karbon handle tax and billing?

Karbon supports tax and billing as part of the same connected practice management workflow.

For tax teams, Karbon provides structured templates, deadline tracking, extension workflows, dashboards, and queues that show what is ready, what is blocked, and what needs attention. 

Firms can connect tax-specific tools like ProConnect for tax prep, StanfordTax for organizers, and TaxNow for IRS transcript alerts. Approvals and signatures stay tied to the relevant work in Karbon.

Karbon Engagements connects signed client agreements to the work that follows, and Karbon Billing & Payments then builds invoices from that work. It supports time-and-materials, fixed-fee, recurring fixed-fee, and progress billing, with invoice approval before anything goes to the client.

Clients can pay by card or direct debit in the portal. WIP, realization, and AR aging reports show what the work is earning, while invoices and payments sync to QuickBooks Online or Xero to keep AR and GL aligned.

Tax work, client communication, time, billing, and payment status stay connected, which gives the firm a clearer view of both the work in progress and the revenue attached to it.

Is Karbon a fit for a smaller firm?

Karbon can fit smaller firms, especially if the firm is growing, managing recurring client work, or trying to move beyond inboxes and spreadsheets.

A very small firm running mostly solo work may only need a simple task board. Karbon becomes more valuable when several people serve the same clients, client requests need to be tracked, recurring services need to run consistently, or the owner needs visibility without manually checking every job. 

Karbon can provide the structure to help the firm grow without relying on the owner to remember every detail.

Is my firm’s data safe, and is it used to train AI models?

Customer data is not used to train Karbon’s AI models, and Kai is designed to operate within Karbon’s controlled environment.

Karbon’s web application product is SOC 2 Type 2 certified. Transport Layer Security is used for data in transit, and data stored in the Karbon web application is encrypted at rest with AES-256-bit encryption.

Karbon AI and Kai also follow the firm’s existing security and permission settings, so people only see the information they are authorized to access.

Is Karbon expensive?

Karbon offers three pricing tiers:

• Team: $59 USD/month, per user (paid annually)

• Business: $89 USD/month, per user (paid annually)

• Enterprise: Custom pricing

Karbon is a premium accounting practice management tool—its functionality and price reflect that. 

Cheaper practice management tools reflect a narrower scope, with add-ons or separate modules needed to cover the same operating needs. 

Karbon’s value case is strongest for firms that want a connected system rather than a lower-cost tool that still leaves the team stitching together email, tasks, billing, documents, and reporting by hand. 

With Karbon, firms save an average of $39,191 USD per employee, per year. You can find your own firm’s specific savings using the Karbon ROI calculator.

Book a demo for an in-depth understanding of how Karbon can help your firm grow.