Claude + Make.com Just Changed Accounting Automations Forever!

Setting up automations for accounting firms in 2026 is nothing like it used to be because now you can connect tools like Claude directly to make.com and have it set up everything for you. This means you don't have to have advanced skills, know how to code, or hire a contractor. You can literally sit in Claude, talk to it like a human, and have it launch automations that are ready to go in just a matter of minutes. Now, if you're an accountant, you know how powerful this can be. And in this video, I'm going to walk you through how to use make.com and Claude to create automations for your accounting workflows. We'll go through why this is changing the way people run their accounting firm How to actually set it up, and a few live use cases. And these are some of the same processes we've helped clients with to save them over 50,000 hours per year within their firms. But first, we need to talk about what it's like doing things the old way. You know, a few years ago, automating anything inside an accounting firm meant one or two things, right? You either sat down and learned a developer's tool, or you paid an agency to build it for you. Like, the reason for that was that, well, Zapier was the tool that's easy enough for someone with no experience. Automations it offers were very limited. On the other hand, Make.com gave If you farm more, we'll also give you the ability to customize automations. But the problem is the tool is a little bit more difficult to navigate. It has a steeper learning curve, which means most people ended up really ignoring automations entirely. This is too complex, this is too expensive, and ignoring altogether. So either doing it manually or hiring a new person was what they were left with. But recently that all changed because now you can connect Claude straight to Make, which means instead of learning complex new systems yourself, you can prompt Claude in plain English and it builds automation for you. in Make, all without you needing any advanced technical knowledge. Now, while using Claude to build in Make is the main use case I want to show you today, there's one other way to utilize this connection, which we'll get to in a few minutes. But first, how do you even connect the two together? Well, all it really takes is a few clicks and a login and account on both Make and Claude. Once they're connected, Claude can read from your Make account and act directly inside of it, which means you can talk to it like an employee. Like a human and have it build, run, and even update your automations. Claude does some of the engineering part and you just have to describe what you want. And then of course, do some of the testing to get it to your standard. Say every new client payment comes in through Stripe for a client you're working on. Someone on your team still has to go in, open QuickBooks, create matching invoices by hand one at a time. Normally automating that requires you to learn some of the triggers, the modules, the field mappings I make. But instead, let's see if we can tell Claude in a single sentence to build it. And see if it does the whole thing for us. So I could spend 10 minutes explaining it all to you, but actually let's pull up both tools and just show you how it works. All right, so we are here in the Claude desktop app. You can follow similar steps in the browser if needed. I will go to Customize and specifically I'll go to Connectors, to My Connectors, and make sure that I can see mail.com available here. If it is not available here, then it's something that needs to be enabled at the organization level by going to Organization Settings, assuming you are an admin. Going to connectors and adding it on this table with this add button. I'm gonna go back to this view 'cause we already have it enabled for the organization. So I just have to connect my user to it. And just by clicking on this connect button, it should prompt a screen that allows me to follow certain prompts. Here, just gonna say I'm gonna continue to the connector. It pulls up Opsur, the Make window. By the way, I have this in dark mode. I'd rather do dark mode. I'm just going to allow it to view, modify some of these things within our company, and I'm going to click allow. It should say, hey, you're all set. You can close this page. And effectively, that should allow us to see Make now with a little bit of a checkmark, which means Claude has access to it. This is the point where you may want to go into Make, and you can actually do this at the organizational level to ensure you block certain actions. So you feel those are particularly risky and/or make sure that they need manual approval. So this is not something that your team or, uh, team members are doing like crazy. I wouldn't want to like delete credentials, for example. Uh, most of these write and delete tools might be something you want to either keep as need approval or potentially block. I'm not going to go into super deep here, but this is something that is a best practice from a security standpoint, that you ensure you allow what is reasonable, but also things like deleting scenarios, for example, it's something that I may not want to allow the, uh, Claude to do, or at the very least, I wanna make sure it asks me for manual approval before moving forward. Next thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna make sure Make has access to the accounts we want to have enabled. Let me turn off dark mode here briefly so this looks a little bit more familiar, but I'm gonna make sure I have connections to Xero, which we use internally, and Stripe so that we can create a simple accounting transaction automation together. It's worth knowing a little bit of a hiccup with Make, but you cannot create connections from the connections tab. You have to almost like simulate your creating a scenario. So let me go ahead and go to the scenario tab. So I'm going to open up Stripe, find the action I believe I'm going to need for this particular thing, just to make sure I'm providing the right context. If we want to send invoices from one system to another, let's just say for invoices. Most likely I wouldn't want to be searching or listing them. So let's just say that that's what I want to use. In this case, looks like I already have a Stripe connection, but let's assume I didn't. I would just simply click on Add. It asked me for certain types. This tends to be easier. And let's just say this is the Upsource YouTube Tests. And I'm going to click on Save. And similar to the process to connect Claude, here it should allow me to effectively through a simple logging flow as long as I am signed in to connect it. I'll skip through this. So after going through that flow, I can see here that there is a new connection. So at least I know now that Make has access to Stripe. And as a result, Claude could access Stripe at any point through Make as well as being able to create any automations with it. Let's just say I also want to add here, we said Xero, but let's use QuickBooks. I know it's a little bit more popular. And here I would want to be creating an invoice. And again, I'm just going to go through the same process of adding a new connection. Let's just say it's the newest QuickBooks one. For clarity, I'll just say that this is YouTube test. I click on connect to QuickBooks. It's going to happen. It's going to lead me to a page where I have to log in to provide the information. I'll skip through this again and come back. And as you can see here, now we have the QuickBooks version as well. So I've properly connected the tools I'm expecting to need to be able to build the automation. Now I'm going to go back to Claude. And say something simple like, hey, create a make scenario. Make sure we're using one of the latest models. Create a make scenario that takes new Stripe payments and creates an invoice in QuickBooks. Say that's as simple as I say it. Let's see what it comes up with. Now, while Claude does that, for a lot of firms, I know that AI sometimes is a little bit too much to learn, right? Especially if you're already dealing with dozens of clients, tight deadlines, several team members. So if you don't want to do any of this, yourself, whether it's setting up the connections, prompting the automations, trying to figure out what to do in the first place, you can have us do all of that for you. We're a done-for-you AI agency that builds these exact AI and automation systems for accounting firms, and it's the same work we've done and handed one 35-person firm back 3,900 hours of capacity without hiring. So if you'd rather skip straight to the results, feel free to book a call using the link below. We'll show you exactly how we can save time and money for your firm using systems just like the one I'm showing you now. So if that's something you're interested in, feel free to hit the link below and book a call. Now let's take a look at what Claude has come up with. So as you can see here, it's asking me some questions. Is this just invoices only or invoices and payments? Let's say I want both. What are the connections you want to use? It was smart enough to identify there are several connections here. Which one should I use? I see Opter YouTube Test as the name. I suspect that's the one you want me to use, and it's absolutely right. How should the QuickBooks connector be resolved? This is actually very important. It's thinking through, it's rare that it's going to be simply, hey, I'm going to create an invoice every time. I need to match it to a customer. How should I think about doing that? Should we try to find the customer by email and then create it if it's missing? That's a very common thing that an engineer would have to think through. And if the engineer doesn't, it's sort of like missing the point and they will have issues later on where the invoices aren't matched properly, right? It's fine that it's thinking about that and it's given me the recommendation that makes sense, which is find it via email and create it if it's missing. And then it's saying, hey, should I build it live and hand you a blueprint to review first? Nope, I want you to build it and turn it on and move forward. So let's just say that that's the option I want. All right, and here we are back after a fair amount, probably like 10 or 12 minutes, and saying live and running. Here's the Stripe payments to QuickBooks invoices paid scenario, and here's what it's doing. It's watching for events, and every time a charge succeeds, it's going to query to see if we can find that email, taking it from Stripe, then seeing if the customer exists to create the invoice and create the payment. And if the customer is missing, it will create the customer first to create the invoice and the payment right after. Just for ease, can you share the link to the scenario with me, please, so we can take a look and run it? This is what the scenario looks like. As you can see with the different paths, if the customer is already in QuickBooks and if it's not, it's also assessing if it's a real payment, assuming the object is over $0, which is a very good like detail that it kind of took into account. Like we want to, we want to process this for a $0 charge that we did for to authorize a payment as an example. So it's kind of done the job even it's kind of gone through the process in some cases of realizing, hey, I need to do a query in this case for this specific customer's primary email address being what's coming from the object within Stripe itself. Now that I think about it, it's going to be challenging to run it because I don't, I'm expecting any payments today, but it's very well built and it will just be a matter of testing it, ensuring it's working correctly. I'll probably be comfortable leaving this on, seeing what happens the next time and just monitoring it to make sure it's working properly. And that brings us to the second way to use these 2 tools together. See, on their own, tools like QuickBooks and Xero have some limitations with their native connections to Claude. You can paste in a report, sure, you can pull some things, do certain things with one file, by the way, But you can just ask Claude a question to have it pull live numbers for you, for your entire firm. And that's a problem because the whole point of putting AI on your tools is to stop sporting and pacing in the first place. And now we're just pacing in the different place, which is in AI. So this is where Makes can do a lot of heavy lifting that people don't appreciate and know. You can link Make to Claude and then Claude to Xero or QuickBooks. And now Claude can reach those accounting tools through Make as the middleman. Very important. Actually, we know a firm that worked through a QuickBooks to Xero migration that way. So there's a lot that now Claude will be able to do that it wasn't able to do before because now you're using Make and Make has a lot more tools available to do the job. So you don't have to copy-paste anything when working with Claude and now it reads directly from the ledger, allowing you to use the data for whatever you want. And as a side note, if you want access to our custom QuickBooks connector that we've actually built and open source for the community. You can also see the link in the description below, or you can just keep following along to see how we set it up, in this case through Make. Now let me show you what that looks like. So let's open up a new chat. And as we said, now Claude should have access to that QuickBooks account, do anything we want in it. And what if we tried to say, hey, can you pull our Stripe payments for this month Let's just say that's part of what I wanted. And I'm going to ask it specifically to do it through Mink, just to see if it has the capability available. Let's see. It's asking me again for which specific connection. I'm going to tell it that it's the YouTube test. What counts as a payment? Just a successful charge or all charges, including failed and refunds. I'm not going to mind that. It was even asking me, what about, is it just the payouts? If you were doing a little bit more like a cash basis and just trying to reconcile the payouts, you could do that as well. Well, or the balance transactions, which is like everything, right? The full ledger, the charges, the fees, the refunds, the payouts, which probably would be the more detailed. But for the sake of this, let's just say successful charges. So we can see Make actually executing a scenario where it is listing all the charges with Stripe in a particular date range. And it's kind of showing me here that it's consuming credits from Make. It's worth knowing. But in this case, I can actually be able to see the data here. Without even needing to go into Make, but being— we're able to work with this directly. It's a very, very good feature from the Make connector that also has some interface things that come up as you see the process running. And as you can see, it was able to pull through all the payments from Stripe directly through Make, which we can validate here because it's the only connector available. Let's just say now that you're working again, we pulled that from Stripe. We can verify all of this. But let's say I wanted to push that to QuickBooks. Could we do that? Absolutely. Let's ask it now. Can you go ahead now and push that to QuickBooks? It remembers, I know it's going to ask. So make sure you also give— push it to the Opsur YouTube Test connection that is currently there for the QuickBooks account. Now I want you to effectively fully reconcile all payments to date into that particular QuickBooks account. And this is the way in which, as I mentioned earlier, we've had firms do a lot of like Big catch-up projects potentially, where they're bringing a lot of data, pushing it into QuickBooks, pushing it into Xero. Other firms are doing migrations from one system to another, and because of the limitations of their native connectors to Claude, they're using Make as the middleman. And check this out—it's even smart to recognize. Wait a second! There's a scenario already that's supposed to do this. Why are you asking me to do it? I might be able to elaborate and tell it, "Hey, I want you to do it month today because I expect the automation to do it moving forward." But I have to do the catch-up work. To get it to balance today. Let's see what it does. Actually, guess what? You recognize that this existing scenario, it's a go-forward webhook. It's not backfilling anything. It's so funny that it's kind of like getting to the same conclusions I am as we go. And you can see how smart it really is. It's going to take its sweet time to push that through. I'm not going to wait for it, but that's exactly how you can connect Claude to Make to start running automations. for your firm without touching a single line of code, and in some cases, being able to overcome the native limitations of the tools you're using to automate your accounting work. But connecting these 2 is really just a piece of the puzzle because the firms that are pulling ahead right now aren't using just one AI tool, they're using the right handful of them together, as you can see. So if you want to see the 10 tools we think every firm should be using in 2026, watch this video next. I'll see you there, and until then, stay efficient.