Doing accounts was never my favourite pastime. But unless you stay on top of them, they soon get out of hand, right? One of the real pains for me is, or was, month end. Getting all the receipts and invoices into the right folder, renaming them, wondering have I missed anything? Then entering them into my balance sheet. Double checking everything. Ugh, such a time-thief!
But then I decided to have a chat with Claude to see what we could do to improve things. And by the end of the day, I had a whole new system in place and I love it.
Here's what we did
First I asked the question. 'Claude, I need you to help me organise my receipts/invoices and to keep my balance sheet up to date. I get receipts and invoices every month in all kinds of file formats that need sorting and filing. The goal is for me to be able to give you my receipts at month end so you can file them accordingly and enter the corresponding figures into my balance sheet.'
Claude replied, 'OK, let's create an inbox folder to drop new invoices and receipts into. Don't sanitise them, don't reformat them. Whatever file type they arrive as (pdf, email, screenshot), leave them like that.
And don't rename them, I'll do it!'
Next we created a folder structure so each month of the financial year had its own folder. Claude did the work, creating and naming all the folders in the correct structure inside the same directory as the receipts inbox.
I then copied all my unfiled receipts and invoices into the inbox folder. I saved a copy of my balance sheet spreadsheet into the same folder as well. I explained to Claude how my spreadsheet worked, and what information needed recording from each receipt into it (date, transaction type, description, amount etc).
Claude looked at my balance sheet and asked a couple of questions, such as how each month was usually designated on the spreadsheet tab, and what did column F stand for? (Column F as it happens is where I select a classification for each entry from a dropdown list, such as travel, professional fees, refreshments, stationery etc.) Amazingly, Claude confirmed back that it now understood my spreadsheet, and we were ready to start!
I gave Claude the green light and it went to work.
First it read each receipt file in the inbox, worked out the supplier, the date, the classification and the amount, and renamed the file using a consistent pattern. Claude then moved each receipt to the right tax year and month folder without me doing a thing. The inbox folder went empty.
Here is how Claude renamed the files for me. Compare these two filenames:
The new filename would now be searchable, easily sorted and understood, even three years on from now. Left as is, there would have been no chance of that. And it all happened in less than 2 minutes. Once the receipts had been processed, Claude then wrote them into my balance sheet as well, with no input from me.
But here's where it got interesting
'Claude, I've added 11 invoices to the inbox, can you process them please?' Actually, I had added twelve - one was a duplicate with a slightly different filename. Claude spotted it and prevented a duplicate entry from being made.
Claude also noticed a recurring invoice with a different amount to that which I'd entered manually the previous month. A price change! Rather than ignoring the difference, Claude flagged it up and suggested I check the previous month's invoice just in case. Turned out my previous 3 months of manually entered figures needed updating. Claude caught the error and saved me from underclaiming on my broadband costs. No amount of checking the spreadsheet would ever have spotted that. Only Claude checking the actual invoice did.
Making this repeatable: or how we built the tools
By the end of the day, I now had Claude doing two new things for me, and I didn't write a single line of code.
You can save instructions and processes like this for Claude to rerun in the future, which are known as Skills. You teach Claude how a particular job is done and what the outcome should be and it remembers. So, we made this a new skill that files the receipts I've dropped in the inbox and posts them to the balance sheet whenever I tell Claude it's 'month end'. But Claude also suggested making another skill, one that closes off a month. This one checks every expense row has a receipt to go with it and that every receipt has a row. It reviews the recurring bills against what was actually invoiced, produces a list of anything I've missed, and sets up next month's balance sheet ready.
Flag errors, but don't stop
When Claude hit something requiring a decision, for example, is a lunch receipt claimable, or is this domain a business cost, I didn't want it to stop and wait for me to decide. Stopping on every query would make the whole process probably slower than doing the job myself. But equally bad, Claude deciding without asking me could lead to errors being entered in.
So, we came up with a middle-ground. Claude would make a reasonable assessment call, do the processing work, and then tell me afterwards if it had assumed anything. So I'd keep the speed and the control. And once I'd given a standing answer, i.e. 'I only claim lunch when I'm working away', Claude would apply that answer from then on without asking me again. Though it would still tell me that's what it did at the end as a safety net.
That ability is what I think separates AI that actually saves you time from AI that just moves work about. Claude is acting like a real colleague who reads every document properly, has no problem about being instructed, and keeps saying 'are you sure about this one?' which I still find fascinating.
Where we finished up
By the time we'd finished that day's work, all receipts were filed and named consistently, every expense row on my balance sheet had a corresponding file to back it up, every document was accounted for in the balance sheet, and we had two new skills to make the whole process easily repeatable every month.
But the best thing I ended up with, apart from the tidy folders, was knowing and not just hoping that my expenses had been rigorously checked and recorded, without the headache and the hassle, or the fear of 'did I miss something?'
It took half a day to set up the entire process. Now month end takes less than 10 minutes!
I'd been dreading that job for days. Now I almost look forward to it.