In your Karbon Settings you can manage your Colleagues, Teams and Job Roles. This is where you can invite your new colleague into Karbon, control their user permission, dedicate them to a team and specify the different job roles that your practice uses.
Index
Video Overview of Colleagues, Teams and Job Roles
Invite a colleague
Adding a colleague or new user to Karbon is as simple as adding their email address and clicking 'invite'.
To add a new user, on the main menu, click 'Settings' and then select 'Invite'.
Then enter your colleague's email details, choose which User Permissions you would like them to have, and Karbon Concierge will send them an email letting them know that you've invited them.
Keep in mind when you invite in a new user, their user fee will be added to your firm’s subscription. If you have a question regarding this, please reach out to our Support Team at support@karbonhq.com or in-app via the Help & Feedback.
Their status will remain as pending until they accept the invite.
Inviting a colleague with a different domain
It is not necessary for all users in your Karbon account to have the same email domain. For instance, a contractor can be invited into Karbon without using the same email domain as the rest of your firm. You can do this by following the usual steps to invite a new user.
Resend an invite
At any time you can resend the invitation link to your colleague. From 'Settings' in the main menu, click 'Colleagues'. Anyone in your team who hasn't accepted their invitation yet will display a pending status. Click on their name and scroll to the bottom to resend their invite.
Note that this will expire the previous invitation and send a new one to your colleague.
Note: If your colleague has not received the invite in their inbox when you sent it out initially, please have them check their spam email before resending the invite. If they still can't find it, try the following steps to solve the issue before contacting support.
Have your colleague close all browser windows
Have them open a new browser window
Resend the invite from Karbon
Have them clear their cache and cookies in their browser
Have them open an additional browser window and manually type in the link for Karbon (typically app.karbonhq.com) Do not use a saved or bookmarked URL
Have them check their email and accept the new invite in their native email account. Your colleague should now be able to log in
Controlling user permissions
User permissions let you control who can perform some company-wide actions. There are two types of permissions, your normal user permissions which allow team members to have certain access throughout Karbon and extra permissions which allow team members access to Time & Budget. You can only control other users' permissions if you are an admin user in Karbon.
When you add a new user to your team's Karbon account, they will be given Standard User permission restricting them from accessing Settings and exporting contact or work data.
If you would like to have your new team member have different access, you should update their permissions through your 'Colleagues Settings'.
User permissions
If you are currently listed as an admin, you can alter a team member's user permissions. To do this locate them in Settings > Colleagues, select the appropriate colleague, and click 'Edit'. You have three options for user permissions:
Admin User
Full access (including access to Settings and downloading data)
Standard User
Cannot access Settings
Cannot export Contact or Work DataRestricted User
Can access only
My Week (cannot Add Note from My Week)
Clients that they are on the client team for
Work items they are on the work team for
Global search function for emails, work items and clients they have access to
Note: Restricted users cannot create work for clients they do not have access to and they are also not able to see Settings or Insights or export contact or work data.
Extra permissions
These extra permissions allow admin team members to have access to certain Time & Budget, Insights, Billing, or Work features
View Dollar Amount
Allows you to decide which team members can see the dollar value for budgets and actuals throughout Karbon if Time and Dollars for Budgets is selected in Time & Budget Settings. This permission is also required to allow the team member to record expenses
Access to Billing
Allows a user to find billable work and create draft invoices for approval. Once approved if you use QuickBooks Online or Xero, you can export CSVs specific to each and import in your preferred system.
Time Administrator
Allows a user to view and approve everyone’s timesheets as well as to be chosen by colleagues to have timesheets submitted to for approval. Multiple Time Administrators are permitted to exist. In addition, users can now restrict Role selection to the specified Roles on a user's profile. Task Type selections can also be restricted per Role.
Edit Colleagues' Time Entries
Insights
Allows you to decide which team members can see Insights. Insights will be turned on by default. Admins will be able to turn it off for certain users, to restrict access to Insights. The restricted user will still be able to see Insights in the menu, but not view any additional information when clicking on it
Privacy for Colleague's Week
Allows a user to decide if they want colleagues to be able to see their My Week.
Restricted users will not have this setting. Other users will always be able to see their week. Restricted users can't see Colleague's Week, but can access their own My Week.
Admins or other users cannot turn off this privacy setting for other people. It is individual permission and choice and other users won't be able to see or edit it in your user profile
Work
Allows users to give/remove permission on the status of any task or work regardless of whether it’s assigned to them. Also, users can provide enhanced permissions that edit work details including due dates, tasks, and assignments, and who can create or delete work items. This helps avoid unauthorized use, accidental changes, and data inconsistencies across different systems.
The Work permission enhancements introduce three permissions that allow users to control who can:
Change the status of any task or work (without this permission you can still change the status of Tasks and Work that are assigned to that user)
Edit work (Without this permission users cannot reassign, edit due dates, add, remove, or edit tasks, budgets, etc)
Create and delete work
Edit user permissions
Navigate to the colleague and toward the bottom of the screen, you will be able to adjust the user permissions. After saving, you will need to refresh your browser to enable the update.
The Colleagues view in 'Settings' will show, you at-a-glance, who in your team has which user permission.
Edit your own or a colleague's details
You can edit your own or your colleagues' details from Karbon's Settings section.
From 'Settings' in the main menu, select 'Colleagues'.
Click your own, or a user's name, to edit the following information for that individual:
Full Name
Handle — for @mentioning
Job Title
Job Roles — select from your list of Job roles
Function — select the relevant function in the practice
Teams — select from your list of Teams
Phone number
Social media profiles
Capacity — hours per week available
Notifications — choose if you want notifications in Triage on / off
User permissions — used to control access restrictions
Extra permissions — gives access to Time & Budget, Insights, Billing features, or Work features
Email settings — enable auto-share of email from contacts
Once you've finished making changes, don't forget to select 'Save'.
See if a colleague is online
Everywhere you see a colleague’s avatar image, you’ll see a green dot if they are currently logged into Karbon.
If you go to Settings > Colleagues from the main menu, you will see all your team listed. This is a handy way of seeing at a glance who is online and offline.
Remove a user/colleague
A team member can be removed from your Karbon account at any time from your Settings menu using the Archive User feature. To remove a colleague from your Karbon account, you will need to be an Admin user.
On the main menu, click Settings > Colleagues and then select the colleague you'd like to remove. You'll then see the colleague's profile and can:
Click on 'Archive User'
Choose the colleague who will own the removed colleague's assignments
Click Archive User & Reassign Items
The colleague will now be removed from your Karbon account.
Ensure a proper handover when a colleague is leaving
You can easily remove someone from your Karbon account, but there are several steps you should take to ensure any emails, tasks and work items for that team member do not go unattended:
Make sure the employee who's leaving clears their Triage
Then, go ahead and remove the team member from your Karbon account. When you do so, if they have work assigned to them, Karbon will ask you if you want to reassign it to someone else, so you can bulk assign all the person’s work to someone else (unassigned items in their triage, such as emails and comments, will not be reassigned by this process). Note - This will also reassign the role of Client Owner for their private/hidden contacts.
Best Practice Tip: If there are multiple people who will take ownership of their outstanding items, you can create a temporary user with a dummy email address (you won't be charged for this user provided the invitation is not accepted), then re-assign the tasks to the temporary user when you archive the colleague.
When reassigning items, note that for work on repeating schedule that is not in a status of completed, will be bulk reassigned along with the other items mentioned above. The new assignee will then automatically carry forward on future instances of work on the schedule.
If no work items on the schedule are currently active (for example, an annual repeating tax return where the current year's work is complete and the next year's has not been created yet), then when the next work item in the schedule is created it will be assigned to the Colleague designated in the bulk reassignment described above. Don't forget that if you are using a dummy user to split the reassigned work across multiple people, new work from the schedule could be created for that dummy user in the future.
Changing a user's password in the email provided won't immediately eliminate access to Karbon, as the user will still be authenticated. In order to eliminate access, the user must be archived in Karbon.
When you remove the user from Karbon, ALL emails that have been added to timelines will remain. We recommend however assigning out all emails currently in their Triage prior to archiving them to ensure no communications are missed.
Managing the replacement of a team member
If you hire a new staff member to replace a departing one, you'll want to ensure all work and tasks are reassigned in Karbon. This is an easy process.
If you haven't already done so, invite the new staff member as a Karbon user. Next, you'll want to remove your old staff member from your Karbon team. You can do this from your Settings. Karbon will then ask you to whom you want to reassign all assigned items to. Choose the appropriate team member and click on Archive User & Reassign Items.
Remove archived colleague as an option for assignments
Follow these steps to remove an archived colleague as an option for assignments:
Right-click anywhere on the Karbon page and select 'Inspect'.
A debug panel will open
Halfway down the debug panel, there should be a console tab
At the bottom of the console tab, type: window.localStorage.clear()
The response should be 'undefined'
Close the browser, then reopen Karbon and the colleague should no longer display
Restore a colleague
To restore access to a colleague, click on Settings > Colleagues > Show removed colleagues and select the colleague to restore access. Restoring access to a colleague will not restore any previously assigned items.
Adding and managing Teams
Karbon makes use of teams to work the way your firm does.
You can add and manage Teams, which will let you filter your Kanban view to only show work that is assigned to team members, giving managers a view of what’s most important to them and to make it easier to report on team project work.
In Settings > Colleagues > Teams you can add the teams within your firm.
Within each Team, you can add as many sub-teams as you need. From each team and sub-team, you can add Team members.
Best Practice Tip: Start by structuring your teams like the departments or functional groups you already have within your firm. Remember, a colleague can be in any number of teams and sub teams. Therefore, you can represent reporting relationships and how people interact within and across teams.
However, when using teams to review work in Karbon’s Kanban, all work for all team members will be shown. Thus, be careful of your inclusion of managers and partners within a given team since their collective work will also be included.
Updating a team's mention handle
All Karbon teams can be given a mention handle, which other colleagues can use to notify all members of that team in internal comments and notes.
To add a Team Handle, select the team that you would like to update from Settings > Colleagues.
From the team's options menu, choose to 'Rename team'.
You will then be able to choose a new team handle to be used to @mention all team members.
Adding or editing Roles (including dollar amounts)
Roles provide two capabilities:
To be a placeholder in work templates to enable selecting colleagues when creating or while completing work. When you create Work from the Template, you can swap out the Role placeholders with colleagues
To identify dollar amounts based on the type of person doing the work and at what rate overall (and per task type) the work should be billed for
To add new Roles or edit existing ones, choose 'Settings' from the main menu, then 'Colleagues' and select the tab for 'Roles'. If you haven't edited your Roles before, you'll notice some pre-populated roles (and default billing rates) based on the most frequently used roles and rates for your specific country of origin.
To add a new Role, select 'Add Role'.
Give your new Role a name, and select 'Save'.
To edit an existing Role, simply click the name from your list of Roles, change the name in the 'Role Name' field.
To adjust the Dollar Amount for the Role, you have two options to choose from:
Standard dollar amount
This rate is the default rate that is used when you create an estimate for that role for ALL task typesCustom by task type
If you select this setting, you will be able to adjust the dollar amount for each and every task type that can be associated to this Role. The default rate will be populated initially and simply click the amount to adjust
Once done, select 'Save' and you'll be able to use these newly saved Roles and associated Dollar Amount to assign tasks to in a Template and build budgets and track actuals.
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