From signed proposal to onboarding work in Karbon

Ask a firm what happens after a client signs and you get a confident answer. Ask who actually does it, and it gets quieter.

Somebody has to create the client in Karbon. Somebody has to open the onboarding work, pick the right template, assign it, and put the one-off fee on it so it does not get forgotten at billing. It is not hard. It is just that it lands on whoever notices, days later, and until it happens the client is signed up in your head and nowhere else.

If your firm runs on Karbon, that now happens on signature.

What appears in your Karbon

The moment a client signs, Power Pricing creates:

The client. An organisation with a contact linked to it, or just a contact, depending on who they are. More on that below, because it is the part people ask about.

An onboarding work item. Built from one of your own Karbon work templates, so it arrives with your checklist already on it. Assigned to the team member you choose. Titled however you like, with the client's name dropped in.

The one-off fee, on the work item. Everything payable on day one added up: the one-off services, the year-end alignment fee, any catch-up. Ex VAT, and it is the figure the client actually agreed, because it came from the proposal they signed.

This is your Karbon. Your API keys, your templates, your team, your data. Power Pricing writes the records and stops there. Nothing is billed or processed through us.

Organisation or contact, and why it differs

Karbon models a company and a person differently, and getting this wrong fills a practice management system with junk that somebody has to tidy up later. So the rule follows the client rather than a setting.

• A limited company or a partnership gets an organisation, with the signatory created as a contact linked to it.
• A sole trader with a trading name also gets an organisation. If the business is called something other than the person, that is a business worth having in its own right.
• A sole trader or individual trading under their own name gets a contact and nothing else. Creating "Jane Smith" as an organisation containing a contact called Jane Smith helps nobody.

You do not configure any of this. It reads the client type and the names on the proposal and does the sensible thing.

No work items until you say who they belong to

There is one deliberate stop in this.

Until you choose who onboarding work is assigned to, no work items are created at all. The client records still sync, but the work does not appear.

That is on purpose. Unassigned work in a practice management system is worse than no work: it sits in a queue nobody owns, nobody is accountable for it, and the first anyone knows is when the client asks why nothing has happened. If we cannot tell Karbon whose job it is, we would rather not create the job.

Pick a person in Settings and it starts working. Change your mind later and it follows.

Which proposals do what

Every proposal type syncs the client records, so your Karbon stays current whoever you are pricing. Only a new client gets an onboarding work item:

• New client. Client records plus the onboarding work item.
• Renewal, repricing and extra work. Client records only. That client is already in Karbon and already onboarded, and opening a second onboarding job for them would be noise.

What it does not do

Being straight about the edges, because you will find them anyway:

• It does not create your recurring work schedules. The repeating jobs for the monthly services are the next phase. Today it opens the onboarding work, not the year's worth of compliance behind it.
• The fee on the work item is the one-off money, not the monthly. One-offs, alignment and catch-up, ex VAT. The recurring fee arrives with the repeating schedules.
• It syncs on signature, not before. Prospects you are still quoting stay in Power Pricing. Karbon is for clients, and somebody you have not won yet is not one.
• It syncs on signature, not continuously. Change something in Karbon afterwards and Power Pricing does not know. Change it here and you want a new proposal anyway, which is the honest way to reprice a client.
• It never blocks a signature. If Karbon is unreachable at that moment, the client still signs and you still get your proposal. The error is recorded so you can see it rather than wonder.

Turning it on

One thing to check first: API access depends on your Karbon plan. If you cannot find API Applications in your Karbon settings, that is a limit at their end rather than something we can switch on, and Karbon support will tell you what you need. Worth knowing before you go hunting for keys.

Assuming you have it, this takes a couple of minutes. In Karbon, go to Settings, then Connected Apps, then API Applications, and create an application. Karbon gives you two values.

In Power Pricing, open Settings, go to Integrations, find the Karbon card, and paste both in. Then choose your work template, pick who onboarding is assigned to, and set the work item title if the default does not suit you.

There is no waiting list and no early access to request. It is open to every firm.

Send a proposal to yourself first and sign it, so you can see exactly what lands in Karbon before a real client does. Then tell us how it went, and particularly what you wanted it to create that it did not.