How to Build AI Systems With Claude (So Your Accounting Firm Runs Without You)

AI tools like Claude have officially started slowing down hiring, yet most accounting firms I audit are still stuck solving problems by throwing more people at them. The moment work piles up, the instinct is always hire one more person. But what if I told you Claude can take those tasks that your team is running by hand right now and complete them in a fraction of the time? No matter how specific or complicated you think your firm's workflows are, well, they can, because that's exactly what I did to take one of our clients' bank reconciliations from a 40-hour process to just 15 minutes. And video, I want to show you exactly how to build those systems with Claude to automate more of your accounting flow. And if you've watched any of my other Claude tutorials for accountants, I'm sure you expect me to pull up the app and start firing off prompts. But you know as well as I do that this approach doesn't work. You can't solve your accounting flow bottlenecks on a whim. And if there's anything I've learned from the dozens of clients we've worked with is that you need to be methodical about how you approach automation. That's Why, when we build systems like this, we follow a 3-step process. And the first is auditing all your firm's current processes. Next is identifying the opportunities to automate that will be the most effective. And only then we can go ahead and actually build the actual automation. So steps 1 and 2 cover how to find the automation opportunity and then simply automating it. And this same 3-step process is what allowed us to save one of our clients 3,900 hours of capacity a year simply by taking a more strategic approach to automation instead of just doing whatever's trending online at the time. Now, with that said, let's start with step 1, auditing your firm, because you can't choose the right things to automate if you don't have a clear understanding of what's costing you the most time and effort right now. So all this step really entails is listing your processes, trying to get a sense of the volume and time that those processes stay today, even if you don't track time, that's totally fine. Some sort of estimate of ballpark, right? It might be how many clients you onboard a year, how many prospects inquire about your business a year, how many bookkeeping clients do you have, how many tax clients, how many payroll clients, et cetera, et cetera. And then double-clicking into the processes that will give you the most bang for your buck to map out everything your team is doing manually step by step. Let's say it's a month in and one of your bookkeepers sits down to categorize client transaction. First, they're pulling the month's activity from the bank feed into QuickBooks. Then they go line by line tagging each transaction to the right account. Perhaps halfway down the process, they've seen a vendor they don't recognize, so they have to stop, dig through all statements, research that vendor online, try to work out what that transaction is about. Potentially a few lines later, they have a missing receipt, so they have to email the client and then wait. Then they move on, circle back once the client finally replies, rechecks everything that they flagged. And that's just an example of what that process might look like for one client for one month. What you would do is write down every step in this process, and that way you can decide whether it's eating up enough of your time to make it worth automating. And if it is, you have step-by-step blueprint to hand Claude so it knows exactly what to do. Now, for many of the workflows you automate, we recommend saving them as Claude skills. And I know turning dozens of tasks into steps for Claude to follow, it's work, right? And that's why we've compiled 11 ready-to-use skills including inbox triage, task return reviews, financial analysis for you to download and use right now for free. So you can access them in the link in the description below. Either way, once you have a clear understanding of what your team is doing every day and how they do it, it's time to figure out which of those tasks are actually worth automating first. This is where you separate the work that needs a human brain from the work that just needs set of rules follow in a similar way every time. And this is a step I've seen too many firms get wrong, right? They're trying to hand Claude the most complex, the highest judgment work that perhaps their seniors are doing. And there could be an argument for doing that. But then if you one-shot that, right, and Claude doesn't execute it correctly the way you expect, you abandon automation entirely and say it doesn't work. When usually the lowest hanging fruit, the right way to go about choosing what to automate first is for looking for that repetitive, high volume and rule-based work, right? Those are the tasks that sometimes eat hundreds of hours a month from your team's time, and they're the ones that AI can handle without getting tired, without cutting corners. So look back at the map you built and just go through it task by task. That client categorization we walked through as an example, super repetitive, rules-based, similar logic every time. So that's an easy yes. Same thing with bank reconciliations. Usually it's a process of taking the data source and the statement, matching, trying to see what are the transactions that are actually there, what are the transactions that are not, what are the transactions that perhaps are there on a different date or a different time or split in different amounts, but totally doable and one that you can hand off too. But then you hit something like a tax planning call or advising a client through a messy acquisition, right? That's probably very judgmental. There's not a rule book for it, so it stays with a human. And then you get something like, say, payroll. It's probably the most repetitive, high-volume, and often rule-based job in your firm. As such, this should be one of the first things that you automate, which is exactly why I want to walk you through how to build the automation For it next. Now, if mapping and automating all of this yourself sounds like a lot of work you don't have time for, I get it. That's exactly why my team and I do it for accounting firms all day long. So we audit their workflows, we analyze what should be automated and what shouldn't, and build the complete AI systems to do it so that way their teams get their capacity back without any extra work being handed off to them or needing to hire to grow. For one of our clients, automations like this have replaced over $3,000 a month worth of software within months. So if you'd rather have us build it all for you rather than do it yourself, feel free to book a call in the link below. Whichever way you choose, that brings us to the final step in this process, which is actually building the automation. Like I said, for this example, I want to walk you through doing it for payroll journal entry. Now, a lot of tutorials out there will show you how to build this skill file that Claude needs to execute, but perhaps never show you how to let it run completely autonomously from beginning to end, which means there always has to be like a human babysitting the entire system, exporting and uploading files to Claude so it can read it, and that's Usually not really freeing up a ton of capacity. You're just handing the same team member a different repetitive task and sometimes completely unnecessary because with just a little bit more effort and simple tools like Make.com, you can hand off the data pulling to Claude too, and then the data pushing as well. That way Claude can access the information it needs directly from the system, then push it to QuickBooks, push it to Xero without any human input. And you just have the human verify that it did it correctly. And with that said, let me take you with me to show you how we build this payroll automation from scratch. All right, so we're here in the Claude desktop app, and the first thing I want to make sure is that Claude has access to both the input and the output. In this instance, I'm going to assume that I'll be working with our desktop app and Cowork, and there is a file or a folder, I should say, I have available on my computer that is synced to a file storage system, perhaps. And that I'll be able to bring through an automation the payroll reports that I need right there. Let's take a quick look at what those reports might look like. You might have something like a payroll summary report with the various liabilities, checks, how many employees, and some of the totals around how much taxes and wages were paid for that particular month, for the particular quarter, and a particular year to date. You might have employer tax, State, local, and employee tax, federal deposits, etc. This is an example of what usually the iSolve payroll reports look like, which is a specific payroll provider. You may also have the details of like the hours, the salary, the overtime, the vacation, the sick days, the holidays, and on and on and on. All of this in a summarized format. You may also have the register report, which now gives you the detail at an employee-by-employee level to tell you the gross wages, the net, the taxes, Et cetera. And of course, some of the metadata of the reports as it relates to the period and the specific period that it relates to. For a company with dozens of hundreds of employees, this can be an entire day of an accountant just trying to kind of key data in to build their journal entry. And let's see how we do it with Claude. Because I know I want to end up ultimately pushing this to QuickBooks, I also want to make sure I have available a connector to it. We have developed a custom connector that allows us connect to the various QuickBooks accounts so that you can have multiple client files and so that you can push data in as well, which are current limitations of the native connect. Usually have that in the description if you want to check it out, but I already have this connect and I'll just confirm it's working correctly. I already have connected client number 1 and I want to make sure they have all the accounts that we need to perform our payroll journal entry. Can you please confirm you have access and return to me that table of current accounts in the chart of accounts just to confirm we have everything we need. Let's just put it there and wait for it to run. Here it's just saying me that it has access, needs access to that specific folder that I've shared with it. I'll just go ahead and say allow and let it run. So as you can see here, it's confirming that it has a lot of the accounts it's going to need, right? The payroll, gross wages, employer payroll taxes, benefits, processing fees, etc., etc. So I'll just go ahead and ask it Perfect. Now, can you make sure to read both the register report and the summary report you have access to? I want you to process all employees one by one. If there happens to be an account specifically for that employee, I want you to do that and match that specific employee with that account. If there's not, please infer into where specifically you should put it in. There are some more broader accounts where that employee's salaries and payroll should But with the accounts you have and the reports you have, you should be able to figure it out. Just let me know in a table here before you push it to QuickBooks as a journal entry, just for me to confirm. Let's wait and see how it does. All right, so as you can see here, we're having some direct matches between employees where if I look for Brandon Madeline, I can see her specific account and her specific gross wages, which is— if we go back to the report I had shared, this It's actually the employee that we see first at the top, and we can see here her exact gross wages, $6,576.92, and we should have here $6,576.92, and there's the rest of them there. It was smart enough to route some of employees into a specialty account and others into an hourly non-providers account as well because those employees didn't have a specific account for them. If we look at the summary report, we can also see here that there's the total for the current pay period of the employer taxes, $12,254, which is— was able to capture some of those company-wide lines, line items as well. And in some cases, it may have some specific questions about exactly how you manage it. Because I'm just running this on the fly, I don't have like a specific skill that tells it exactly where to go find things. It sometimes— it asks back in return some of the things that I might want to provide it for it to get it done the way I want. In this case, I'm just going to assume, hey, this is You did exactly what I wanted. Please go ahead and push that journal entry directly to QuickBooks and just give me the link so I can confirm. And once we see this running, I'm going to go ahead and create a skill so that the next time it does this, it can do it more consistently and so that we could also schedule it to run on a regular basis. So if you say, hey, I'm going to create an automation to pull the payroll report into this folder every month or every other week depending on pay period, now you can set this to run on the same schedule so that ultimately you just have to log into QuickBooks and verify the journal entry was posted correctly. All right, so we have the journal entry posted. Let's take a quick look. So let's open up that link, and then we should be able to see the entire journal entry with the right date, all the various employees that are or have an individual account separated properly, which is how this specific firm wanted it. Some of the other accounts, making sure this balances, and this should be simple as saying Okay, great. Let's just save it and we should be good to go. If it didn't do something the way you want it, that's where you can have some back and forth and then save this as a skill so it knows how you want it moving forward. Let's assume it did it the way I wanted and now I can go ahead and ask it to create a skill for me for future runs. Can you please go ahead and create a skill off of this chat, please? Should be literally as simple as that. In fact, it has a turn into skill feature here that it just does exactly that. It's just ask Claude directly to turn it into a skill. It should be as simple as that. Here it is suggesting what that skill should look like. If I click on here on the content, I should be able to read through what exactly it's suggesting. So it's saying here, confirm access and pull the chart of accounts, locate and review the payroll reports, reconcile before mapping, map every employee one by one, build on the non-wage pool lines, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. It's worth knowing that this is just an example for one client. We do recommend and something you can do to make sure that this skill is created at a firm-wide level, and then you have individual nuances per client. So you can just with one skill run the payroll report for all your entire client base. And worth mentioning too, if at any point you need to update these instructions, again, this is written in English, so it should be as simple as you just reading through the skill file to update it, or again, asking Claude to do it for you. That's exactly how you build an AI system that runs your client work for you. You audit what your team is doing, you identify the work that doesn't need a human, and you let Claude automate it. Now, if you want to see what happened when I asked Claude to do a month of bookkeeping in 10 minutes, feel free to watch this video next. I'll see you there. And until then, stay efficient.