What we shipped: The first half of 2024 in review

It’s been a big six months at Karbon. We started the year strong with the release of Karbon’s most extensive feature to date: Billing and Payments. After months of beta testing and working with Karbon customers to strengthen this feature, it’s been exciting to see it in action and hear your experiences.

As well as Billing & Payments, we’ve released a whole lot of other practice management enhancements and updates.

I’ve summarized all the major #KarbonUpdates from January to June in 2024.

All of these features, along with what’s coming next, will also be discussed in our upcoming Product Roadmap webinar. Register to join me and my team of Product Managers live, or to receive a copy of the recording.

On to the updates.

Billing & Payments

In January, we officially launched Billing & Payments, enabling easy access to flexible billing, faster payments, and real-time reporting—all in one place.

Billing integrated into your workflow

Karbon Billing provides you with a fully automated billing workflow that removes the manual steps of reconciling time, work, and billing. It consolidates time-tracking, project management, and invoicing tools into a single platform. 

Flexible billing options

No matter how your firm bills today or how you may bill in the future, you’ll benefit from Karbon Billing.

Engagements view in Karbon’s Billing section shows recurring billing for ‘Accounts’ and ‘Payroll’ for Acme Corporation 

If you bill based on time and materials, you can track time against work and have invoices auto-generated based on your recorded time and expenses. Every billable minute will be accounted for thanks to suggested time entries.

If you bill based on fixed fee and recurring work, you can link repeating work to engagements and easily automate recurring billing. If you still track time for fixed fee work, your realization reporting will also be automated entirely.

Faster and automatic payments

Clients can now also pay securely online via debit or credit card and direct debit. They can save their payment details for future invoices and set up automated payments.

You can also request payment details from clients upfront to ensure timely payments and healthier cash flow.

Real-time reporting

With everything in one place, it’s easier to pull data and gain real-time insights.

You can track WIP, realization, and aged receivables with built-in reports or custom-build billing reports using our API endpoints.

All of these will help you understand profitability and cost of delivery, so you can price your services more accurately.

To learn more about how to maximize Karbon’s Billing & Payments, explore the support content.

QuickBooks Online Accountant integration (beta)

When you send an invoice from Karbon or sync payment data from QuickBooks Online Accountant (QBOA), records will automatically update in both systems. This integration ensures that your billing and payment data remain accurate across Karbon and QBOA.

Help shape the future of this integration by joining the early beta program.

More features of Billing & Payments

In addition to what we’ve already shipped, you’ll see credit notes, client statements, the ability to apply credit card surcharges to clients, and more enhancements coming to Karbon Billing & Payments throughout the rest of 2024.

Karbon Practice Intelligence (KPI) enhancements

Karbon Practice Intelligence (KPI) has received some very exciting and important updates so you can more easily access and control your data and insights.

Access KPI dashboards in-app

We’ve made two updates to improve your KPI user experience.

First, all KPI dashboards are now directly accessible in the app. This plug-and-play experience simplifies how you view and manage reporting in Karbon, and makes it easy for those who aren’t as familiar with PowerBI to fully leverage KPI. 

KPI dashboard access in-app via menu in Karbon 

Second, if you’re the KPI admin, you can now directly manage user access within the Intelligence tab.

New and improved KPI dashboards

We’re always working to build and improve KPI dashboards based on customer feedback.

We recently released a new Realization dashboard that helps you better understand client and firm profitability. 

We also redesigned the Time dashboard to give you more control, visibility, and insights into your team’s billable hours, utilization, and time entries.

Collaborate on shared emails with Shared Triage

Managing shared inboxes with your colleagues is now possible with Shared Triage. Your shared inbox appears along with your personal inbox, giving you greater visibility to collaborate more efficiently and deliver exceptional client service.

You can also change the display name of an email account directly in Shared Triage after connecting it. After which, this will be the name visible to your clients when you email them from Karbon.

Once you’re in the Shared Triage, you can action emails in several ways:

• Reply or forward emails as yourself or the shared email identity

• Add comments and @mention any colleagues

• Assign emails to colleagues 

• Add emails to client work or timelines

• Apply custom email signatures

• Leverage Karbon AI to compose and summarize emails

Here’s a tour of Shared Triage:

Summarize client timeline conversations with Karbon AI (open beta)

You can now use Karbon AI to instantly get up-to-speed on your team’s latest interactions and activity with a client. This enables you to access key client insights faster and have meaningful client meetings without spending hours sifting through emails and internal conversations.

Karbon AI summarizing client timeline conversations in-app

Approvals (beta)

Approvals simplifies the document approval process, and is the first release in the full rollout of eSignature to Karbon.

With Approvals, you can send, track, and monitor approval requests within Karbon, reducing the need to manage multiple apps for status updates. Plus, you can seamlessly integrate documents into your project workflow so you stay on top of all tasks and activities.

Watch this video to see Approvals in action:

If you’d like to be updated on when this feature becomes available, sign up here.

Deadline

Since the beta program in January, Deadline is now a feature available to all Karbon customers. This allows you to add critical external due dates such as tax filing dates to work items, so you can manage internal and external due dates effectively together.

You’ll see this added as a data field in the Work view. As a result, you’ll be able to sort and filter work by deadlines as well as edit deadlines directly in Kanban and List views.

It’s a highly flexible and effective way for you to visualize and manage projects.

Other notable enhancements

• We’ve improved the email contact search by providing more info like contact type, client type, client ID, and organizations involved when you search for a contact.

• Karbon API access can now be configured to return hidden or private contacts and associated work. This feature is disabled by default given the sensitivity of the information, however, you can contact our support team to enable this (support@karbonhq.com).

• Export a full audit trail in PDF when a client requests it. This feature is available in work items and can be accessed by clicking ‘Print Client Requests Summary’. This captures all activities, conversations, and uploaded files associated with the specific client request. Here’s how.