Monday 'waiting on client' digest for each preparer and the partner (Karbon plus outstanding documents)

The problem

Work that waits on a client is invisible until a deadline is close. The figures below come from a vendor survey.

• Financial Cents' 2025 survey: before adopting workflow software, 53.8% of the firms now using workflow software had spent more than 5 hours a week scheduling and assigning work. One respondent's turning point: 'The moment I asked "Where is Client X at?" and no one could answer me.' Vendor survey. Source: Financial Cents, 2025 State of Accounting Workflow and Automation Report (816 firm owners and admins, mostly North America) (Vendor survey by a practice-management software company)
• Karbon and TaxDome both have dashboards and work views that show this inside the app. If your team lives in them, you may not need an email; this recipe puts it in the inbox once a week. Source: Karbon pricing and plan comparison (automatic client reminders on Business and Enterprise) (Vendor pricing page)

Background reading: Client document reminder emails: a ladder that stops when files arrive · A WISP for small tax and bookkeeping firms that use automations: what the Safeguards Rule asks of your tools

Who it's for

US firms of 2-15 people who lose track of 'where is Client X at?' between Karbon, email and a spreadsheet.

Tools and monthly cost

Example month: Illustrative arithmetic. A 5-person firm: 5 digests and 1 summary a week, about 25 emails a month, inside Resend's free tier, and a few dozen Karbon API calls a week. About $0 a month plus your n8n server and the Karbon plan you already have.

Setup

1. Make sure work that waits on a client uses a Karbon status in the 'Waiting' primary status, and that each work item has an assignee.
2. Karbon (optional): in Settings > Connected Apps > API Applications (Business or Enterprise plan), copy the application ID and access key into KARBON_APP_ID and KARBON_ACCESS_KEY. By default the API only sees Public clients; Private or Hidden clients need an admin request to Karbon. Karbon requires both headers on every call; the workflow refuses to send them to any other host. KARBON_REQUEST_INTERVAL_MS paces calls and 429 replies wait for Retry-After.
3. Point it at your document list: the chase ladder's sheet (CHASE_SOURCE=sheet, the default) or TaxDome checklists (CHASE_SOURCE=taxdome, read-only; see the chase ladder recipe for the TaxDome settings).
4. Set CPA_FIRM_NAME, CPA_FIRM_SHORT, CPA_PHONE, CPA_ADDRESS, CPA_FROM_EMAIL, CPA_REPLY_TO, CPA_TZ and PARTNER_EMAIL from .env.example. Every client email is signed with your firm name, phone and address. Run n8n behind HTTPS with multi-factor authentication on the n8n login and on every connected account, keep execution logs short (Settings > n8n data pruning), and add n8n and its host to your WISP's list of service providers. The workflow also has a manual 'run now' webhook used by our tests. Delete it, or put it behind n8n's header authentication, before you go live.

Download

Download accounting-waiting-on-client-digest.zip

Contains the n8n workflow, the mock data, the test runner with its last results, and the mock server we tested against. All keys in .env.example are fake.

Test result

Every workflow was imported into n8n 2.45.4 and run end to end on our test machine. Karbon (API v3), TaxDome (public API v4, read-only), QuickBooks Online (Accounting API with OAuth 2.0), Google Sheets and the email sender (Resend) were replaced by a local mock server built from their official API docs: it checks the same request shapes, authentication headers and query syntax, pages results (Karbon @odata.nextLink, TaxDome cursors, QuickBooks STARTPOSITION), returns HTTP 429 with Retry-After, and expires the QuickBooks access token so n8n's real OAuth2 refresh runs. These recipes use no AI model; every decision is a written rule. Clients, firms and transactions are invented. Verified with mocks; no real client data was used, and nothing was sent to a real person or account.

Actual output from the test run

Scenario W1: one preparer's Monday digest (invented clients). Names and numbers are invented.

Subject: Waiting on clients this week: 2 work item(s), 1 client(s) owing documents

Karbon work waiting on the client (2):
- Cal Nguyen: Q3 payroll filings [Waiting on payroll report]  << due Nov 5 (OVERDUE)
- Ava Brooks: 2025 Individual tax return - Ava Brooks [Waiting on client]  (due Dec 1)

Documents still outstanding (2 items, 1 clients, oldest first):
- Ava Brooks: 2025 W-2; 1099-INT acct *7766 (asked 14 days ago)

Update Karbon when something arrives; the document chase ladder keeps reminding clients automatically.