5 Insane Claude Use Cases For Accounting Firms! (Live Tutorial)

The way accounting firms run their books has changed forever because the work their team does by hand every month is now being completely handled with tools like Claude. But after auditing hundreds of firms, I've realized most of them are stuck doing things the old way. And that's why in this video, I'm gonna show you 5 ways you can implement Claude to start running your books more effectively. This way, you can stop wasting your time with repetitive tasks and focus on what actually drives your teams forward. Now, the first thing I wanna talk about, it's QuickBooks. It's been around for 30 years, yet still doesn't really give accounting firms any sort of dashboard, just like a super standard financial report, a wall of rows and totals that hasn't meaningfully changed in 3 decades. Now, they have tried to create like some new interfaces here and there over the years. There's a new one now coming up or one that came up recently, but still nowhere near what a normal business owner would be able to read and use, which is unfortunate considering most big firms use these reports exactly as they are. They just export them and send that straight to the clients. But think of the moment someone who's not an accountant sees this. Stuff. Like, they don't know which of those figures matters or why, which means less than 10 seconds trying to understand your report, they give up and push it back to their minds. And it's just, you know, something my accountant always says. It's not useful, it's not actionable, and it does nothing to convince your clients that you're giving them any real insight into their business finances, even though the answers they actually need are already in that report. They just can't see or understand it, so it might as well not exist. And that's exactly where Claude comes in, because it can take all the raw data and turn it into something visual A business owner can actually understand. You give it the P&L, you give it the balance sheet, and turns all of those figures into a clean interactive dashboard that shows revenue trends, margins, and where their money is really going at a glance. Now, instead of a report that the client ignores, we're handing them a picture of their business that they immediately understand and can act on. So let me show you how big of a difference that is. Okay, so here we are in Claude, and I want to show you what the underlying Excel or P&L looks like in this particular instance. It's relatively simple. We've seen much worse than this where there are like 50 different accounts and this can really add up the more accounts you have and stops making sense for the business owner. But even this is relatively just a few reports. You can see how it's not really easily digestible or quickly understandable as to what it means and what I should do about it as a business owner. So instead I just drop this report and say, hey, here's a full year P&L with monthly breakdowns, create a client-facing financial dashboard that non-accounting business owners can understand. Highlight the key trends, flag any concerns, and code it such that I can make it public. And then I want you to draft an email for me and send it to the client. After a few minutes of thinking and running some numbers, crunching the math, it gave me 2 options for the email, which is, uh, were pretty good. And more importantly, it gave me this beautiful dashboard that in plain numbers showcases, hey, here's a clear, jargon-free look at how this business performed last year. You finished the year at breakeven. Here is the operating cost at staked is somewhat fixed. These are the revenues and the net profits. Here's where your money went, right? In a beautiful donut chart, he split by payroll, by rents. I can see where the biggest, where my largest costs, what's working and what to watch out for. Some sense of analysis and commentary as to what I should be looking into. It looks like from April to June, I had a big dip in sales and a cash outflow. It's suggesting, you know, my gross profits are decent, so I can at least celebrate some of the wins. And it just wraps up with a simple line here to suggest that our gross margin is at this level and the single most useful lever is to keep our monthly sales over a particular threshold year-round to avoid losses moving forward. Very helpful. Certainly more useful than something like this. Now that you've seen how Claude can turn a QuickBooks report into a dashboard, the next natural question becomes, well, how do we get it to do that? How do we give it the data and how do we scale that across our entire client base? Because jumping between platforms, that alone copy-pasting information isn't exactly efficient, but neither is the native Intuit QuickBooks connector. Now, if you don't know what a QuickBooks connector is, all that means is an integration between the Claude app and your QuickBooks account. However, it has very, very limited functionality. On top of that, it's painfully slow. It defeats the purpose of using a connector in the first place. So what you need is a way to push and pull data from QuickBooks with ease. And since the native one won't do that, we use Claude itself to build a connector that we share and open source for free. So on the pull side is able to read financial statements, P&L, transactions, company details. It can pull all of the information and it can do this across every company you've connected to it at once. So you can ask for the balance sheet and the P&L from 4 different clients in a single go and it just returns them. On the push side, it can generate invoices, estimates, customer payments, deposits, and even send or void those. This connector is what allows you to generate a financial dashboard like I showed you earlier without the copy-pasting because it allows Claude to read straight from the books without you having to bring the data in. And If you're wondering how to get access to this connector yourself, we're giving it away for free. So all you have to do is hit the second link in the description below. It should say QuickBooks NCP. I believe it's appstore.co/quickbooks-ncp. Now let me show you how it works exactly. Now I'm going to switch here to Claude Code, which is where we were able to build this. It lives locally in your computer. That allows for some security features. But I simply asked it, hey, what can you do in QuickBooks that the native connector can't? And it said 4 things. One, it can write to the books transactions. Invoices, bills, expenses, estimates, you name it. Pretty much anything that you can do within QuickBooks, it can. It also suggests I can work with all companies at once. So I have access to 4 companies at the moment. You don't need to reconnect or restart Cloud Desktop to move between client files. Also, a little bit of a jargony thing here, but it actually has a query and an API requests tool. What essentially that means is that even if there is a thing you want to create that doesn't currently support it, it can create its its own tool to access that information. So you don't need to wait for a new tool to come up from us developing it. It can— Clock can be smart enough to use this API request and build its own tool. And lastly, some other month-end mechanics the native one doesn't have, like actually sending the invoices or estimates, attaching files, importing transactions, and so on. Now, as I said earlier, it's not just, hey, let me pull the reports and tell me what they say. Now I can go ahead and fix them and do it for all of our clients. Let's just ask it here. Hey, can you please pull a balance sheet and P&L for all the companies you have connected? Let's wait a couple of minutes and see what happens. So as you can see here, it's actually pulling the P&L for all these 4 different organizations and just showing those to me next to each other, right? And I could have 50. It would take a little bit longer. We'll still get it done. And here's like the balance sheet as well. Now, now these are demo companies. That's why you see a lot of similarities between them. But if you had 4 different clients, of course the data would be different for each one of them. Let's just say now that I wanted to push data just to showcase that this works. Can you please create a customer called Isaac Perdomo? Their name is— their email is isaac@opsa.co. And I want to make sure that you create it for a services item worth $100, quantity of 1. Just make sure to send it so that I receive it via email. Something I failed to say is to say do this for— oh, there you go. It's actually asking me. It's smart enough to say, hey, you didn't tell me which client. So I'm going to go ahead and do the 8315. And let's just wait and see what comes back. By the way, look at this. The create invoice tool didn't accept a quantity, so it's now using the API request to get it done. And this is a perfect example of what I was talking about earlier. If it faces a specific issue or roadblock, it can unblock itself. So even if the API changes, this will continue to do its job pretty well. And as you can see here, I created the customer, I created the invoices, and I send it our way. And if I check my inbox, here we have it. You have the invoice from Greg Design and Landscape services for $100 right here, right there. So this is getting work done in QuickBooks itself. Now that Claude can read straight from the books, we can point it at what might be one of the most complicated jobs and time-consuming and boring jobs in your operations, which is payroll allocation and journal entries. Despite payroll being a recurring process, it's rarely straightforward, and the bigger the business client is, the messier it gets. Even if— and on the smaller end, if you have like a 50-person business, payroll to run requires hours of manual work with plenty of room for error. Wages, payroll taxes, benefits, insurance, paid time off, overtime for one case, whatever it might be, all of that needs to be accounted for. On top of that, it's not rare that you want to take each of those buckets and split it again by department or class. So meaning a single pay period explodes into dozens of individual figures that each need to be mapped to the correct account as one journal entry. And anyone who's done this by hand knows the frustration. You've got a payroll export open with like 6 or 7 tabs, super long spreadsheet for your journal entry template, someone on the team is reading across them, retyping the totals into the accounting software line by line for the better part of our afternoon, if not an entire day. And every one of those lines is just another chance of a number to be put in the wrong place or mistyped. And this is exactly the kind of work that Claude was built for. So instead of wasting hours and risking mistakes, you hand the entire payroll report, it reads the whole thing at once, turns all of those scattered variables into just clean journal entry in a matter of minutes. And all that's left is just to do a quick review. And once you see how simple it is, you'll wonder why anyone in your team would continue to do it manually moving forward. So let me show you. I'm going to go back here to Home, which is where Chat and Cowork exist. And you'll see here a Cowork former chat of a payroll journal entry. Now let's take a look at the files included within this right here. So you can see a payroll summary that has a variety of like super spread apart things, 44 different employees. Here are the taxes, federal, medical, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then you also have another one that is not the summary, but the individual register report of each individual employee and their gross wages, their net pay, their taxes, and just line by line for every employee. You have all this data as well as the company total in terms of salary, overtime, vacation, sick days, holidays, et cetera, et cetera. I'm just giving it these 2 things and telling it, hey, here's a payroll report. What do you need from me to create a journal entry? And I'm using here a skill, which is like a repeatable prompt that in In this case, Claude itself has to be able to get this done. And it went ahead and analyzed the detail of what it needs, taxes, the deposits, the 401 matches, and it asked me a couple of questions. How do you want to book this payroll run? Is it a cash entry, an accrual that's split between those 2 months, a full accrual in March? Please give me also the general ledger or the chart of accounts, and then let me know if you want to split this by department, multiple departments. So it's just asking me for clarifications on a variety of questions. After answer that, it just goes ahead and tells me, hey, here's what the journal entry, the first journal entry should look like, here's what the second journal entry should look like, and these are some of the supporting calculations. I had to ask it in this case, and that's something that you can bake into the skill so you don't need to do it. Essentially, I told it to put it in a way where I can put it into QuickBooks. It went ahead and asked a couple of additional questions, but ultimately it gave me this CSV back in a format that both QuickBooks or any of the popular importers into QuickBooks accept. Which is journal number, and you see it follows a naming convention which sometimes us humans avoid or forget just for ease. Here, journal date, account name, the debits and the credits, and it all matches in the end. So very, very helpful. And this is one of those things that with that QuickBooks connector I talked about, if these things were available and I had this client connected, I could just ask it, hey, go ahead and push that journal entry right now. Now, the use cases I'm covering in this video are only the tip of the iceberg. So if you're serious about integrating AI into your accounting firm and you'd like to go beyond just the basics that you can do yourself, feel free to book a call with us using the link below. We've helped over 100 accounting firms save more than 50,000 hours by automating the workflows, the spreadsheets, and setting up custom integrations and apps to streamline their business. This has allowed some of our clients to close their books in as little as 15 minutes and prepare business returns in as little as 32. So if that sounds interesting for you and your firm, click first link in the description below to book a call. I can't wait to see how we can help. Now, this next use case is the general ledger review. You know, going through the raw list of every transaction a business makes in a period of time and flagging everything that's like miscategorized, duplicated, or just plain wrong, it's a long task. A real ledger can run thousands, if not tens of thousands of lines, so no human can realistically sort through all of that. So most firms just don't do it at all. So those small mistakes that are ignored can sometimes cause unnecessary issues down the line, especially if clients spot them before you do and they have to point them out. Embarrassing. Not only does it look unprofessional, it makes your entire firm look less reliable. With Claude, that doesn't have to happen because it removes the pain of having to do all of it manually. Instead, you can upload the ledger, have it read through every single entry and point out every single mistake faster and more accurately than any human ever could. The transaction that got booked twice or The expense that sat in the wrong account for a long time, 6 months ago, and you haven't caught, or the number that's like an automatic 2 off from everything around it. It can all be brought into your attention in a matter of minutes. And sure, at the surface, this removes the risk of your clients finding mistakes you missed, but it also gives you an advantage, right? Because you can now go to your clients and tell them, hey, we went through your full ledger and caught these 4 errors. And that way you're proving to them that you're good at what you do and that you're on top of giving the businesses you work with even more reason to stay and just keep paying for your services. So you because simply you looked at doing what others will not, when really this is one of the easiest things for Claude to do once you know how to put it in place. Let me show you how to use actual data and make this be more useful. I've actually gone ahead and dropped the general ledger of our company, and here I just told it, hey, here's a general ledger for a company today. Could you please review, flag any anomalies, duplicates, miscategorizations, or anything you think it's worth flagging? Please rank it by severity so I know what to fix first. Now let me show you what the input of that Here's the general ledger with literally thousands of transactions. Literally talking almost three thousand, actually less than that. Twenty six hundred and thirty six across thirty different accounts. Debits and credits equals in the millions of dollars. And it went ahead, did what it needed to do, and it gave me back this beautiful yield review findings in in Excel ranked by severity. One of the things it flagged here, and let's see if this is accurate. I'm a little bit afraid to go deep into this. Observe Pioneer has had zero recorded activity. Doesn't account that. We have, that shouldn't be an issue. You have $10,000 of customer payments parked in stripped clearing. I didn't know that. That might be worth looking into. The stripped clearing account does not clear. Interesting. And you have some customer receipts booked as negative. Okay. So it's finding some stuff that's probably wrong. It's probably true within our client books. I'm not going to dive super deep into it because I'm afraid to expose something I shouldn't, but you can see how I can go ahead and analyze everything within a general ledger to find issues. That you probably have missed for months. And that brings us to the last use case, one that sounds too simple to matter, yet firms lose hours of time to each one of their clients. 2 words: tax prep. When a client hands you a pile of PDF screenshots, statements, pictures, documents in a variety of formats, which means you actually can't start preparing the tax return, someone has to start pulling off an Excel template or like type all of those numbers from those documents into it by hand, one field at a time, whether that's into a template you work with or directly into your tax software. But most of the time, someone typing that in can literally mean your most experienced tax accountant or worse, perhaps even like a tax partner, which means you're like paying advisor-level rates for what's essentially data entry, right? It's a bad trade on cost alone, but it's also risky. Just like with the payroll journal entries, manually rekeying is one of the most reliable ways to introduce a mistake and it's completely avoidable because just like with every other use case we've covered today, Claude can reel all those source documents, populate everything in a work paper for you, including PDFs, including images, handwritten notes, doesn't really matter. All that data entry can completely disappear, and so does the opportunity for mistakes to creep in. So obviously you still have to prepare and like file the actual return and review it, but the hours spent on prep and data entry are brought to effectively zero. Let me show you how simple it is. So let's take a look at the source documents and the template that we have available. This is a template that it's available on excel1040.com. A lot of influencers much just the space of talking about it, but it's effectively a full table with all the forms from the IRS in an Excel format that you can just simply type in. And then we have this bunch of files that include the 1099, several of those. We have a couple of schedules as well— Schedule A, Schedule B, Schedule 1. We have a couple of W-2s as well, and this is all just data. And of course, we have, of course, the 1040 itself. All right, so just going back to the chat and looking at the final output, as I mentioned, just I said, hey, I've given you access to these 4 documents, can you please populate the Excel wallpaper? And just make sure it has access to that particular folder where those, those things exist. It told me, cool, I populated 241 different input cells. I can check that specific file here briefly, which I love from Claude, by the way. You I can like preview these things and you can see here both W-2s and the 1099 and the other 1099 and all the things that came from those source documents are now populated into this particular workpaper. And there's even ways if you wanted to use things like computer use to attempt to send this straight into your tax software as an example. And that's exactly how you can streamline your accounting firm workflows using Claude. Now, if you'd like to do the same but aren't sure how Claude's many features fit into your team, I break that down in this video, so watch that next. And until then, stay efficient.