Karbon
A connector — no code, no developer. Connect Karbon to Magnetic and your two systems stay in step: your client list comes across, jobs you start reach us on their own, and the finished return lands back on the same Karbon job. Your team keeps working in Karbon.
Connect it
You'll need someone with Karbon admin access. It takes about two minutes.
1. Get your access key from Karbon. In Karbon, go to Settings → Connected Apps → API Applications and copy the AccessKey.
2. Paste it into Magnetic. In Magnetic, go to Integrations, paste the key, and choose Connect Karbon.
Your clients import straight away — a few seconds for a small firm, a minute or two for a large one. You can leave the page while it runs.
Once it's connected, the page shows what Karbon is sending you and what we pick up:
Set up your Magnetic statuses
You hand a job to Magnetic by moving it to a status of your own, and we hand it back by moving it to another. We suggest creating two new statuses for this — Send to Magnetic and Review from Magnetic — so nobody hands a job over by accident. It takes a Karbon admin about five minutes.
1. Create the statuses in Karbon. Go to Settings → Workflow and open the Statuses tab. Each status group has its own Add Status button. Add both new statuses in the In Progress group: a job only reaches us while it's In Progress, so a pick-up status in any other group never fires.
2. Turn each one on for all your work types. When Karbon asks, choose Yes to turn the new status on for ALL Work Types, and add it as a Work Status.
3. If you use custom work types, add the statuses to them too. Go to Settings → Workflow, open the Work Types tab, open each custom work type, and tick both new statuses. A status that isn't ticked on a work type doesn't appear on that type's jobs, so you couldn't send them to us.
4. Choose them in Magnetic. In Integrations → Karbon, set Pick-up status to Send to Magnetic and Status when we return it to Review from Magnetic. Created the statuses after connecting? Use Refresh under the pickers to pull them in.
What happens after that
Your client list stays current. Add or rename a client in Karbon and it updates in Magnetic within about a minute. You never maintain it twice. Deleting a client in Karbon archives it here rather than removing it, so past returns keep their history.
Jobs reach us when you send them. A job comes to Magnetic when you move it to your pick-up status. Attach the client's documents first: we take the documents that are on the job at that moment, and files added while we're preparing the return don't reach it.
If you'd rather hand jobs over by assigning them to a person, or only take certain job types, we can set that up instead. Tell us how your firm marks work as ready.
A job we can't finish comes straight back. If a job reaches us with no documents, or linked to a client we can't read, or if we have to stop partway — a password-protected PDF, a file type we can't read, a return we don't prepare — we don't leave it sitting in your pick-up column. It moves to your return status with a PDF attached, named Magnetic - action needed 1 - …, saying what went wrong and what to fix. Fix it and move the job back to your pick-up status. If a file caused it, delete or replace that file first: we take every file on the job each time you send it.
You can leave our PDFs on the job or delete them — we never read them as client documents. They're numbered, so if a job comes back more than once, the highest number is the latest.
The finished return comes back to the same job. When it's ready, the prepared return, workpapers and review notes are attached to the Karbon job they came from, and the job moves to your return status so it shows up on your board. Nobody has to download anything from us and re-upload it. To send it to us again — say, with corrected documents — attach them and move the job back to your pick-up status.
What we read and write
| We read | your clients, and the jobs and documents you send us |
| We write | the finished documents — prepared return, workpapers and review notes — onto the job they came from, and that job's status. If we can't start or finish a job, a short PDF saying why. |
| We never touch | anything else in your Karbon |
Your access key is encrypted and only ever used for your firm.
Turning it off
Integrations → Disconnect. The sync stops immediately. Clients already imported stay in Magnetic, and returns already delivered stay in Karbon. Reconnecting later picks up where you left off.
If something looks wrong
The Integrations page shows what Karbon is sending us and when we last checked. Use Check connection to ask Karbon directly, or Sync now for a one-off catch-up of your client list.
The one failure worth knowing about: if Karbon stops sending us changes, your imported clients are untouched but new edits won't appear. The page says so plainly when it happens, and reconnecting fixes it.
Questions, or a workflow that doesn't fit the above? Get in touch — the pick-up rule is configurable per firm and we'd rather match how you already work than ask you to change it.