I Asked Claude to Do a Month Of Accounting in 10 Minutes (It Did)

Right now, 2 accounting firms are closing the exact set of books. One of them will be done in minutes, and the other one is about to burn 3 days on it. The difference is one of them is using AI to do the busy work while the other one is still running their operations like it's 2009. How do I know? Well, I've implemented these systems for over 100 firms, and I've seen the difference firsthand. However, most accountants right now still have no idea how capable AI is. That's why I'm going to be using Clock to run an entire month of bookkeeping as fast as I can. And I'll be taking you with me through every step. So by the end of it, you'll know whether it's something you should implement for yourself and for your clients. To get started, I've mapped out the entire process into 4 stages so you can follow along with what I'm doing. So first, I need to gather the assets the client provides you, the bank statements, the payroll reports, et cetera, everything, all the data you need. Gonna be feeding that context into Claude and giving an example of a prior month so it can learn how we've handled recurring vendors in the past. Then I'm gonna categorize and tie to the penny bank accounts and credit cards. We're gonna feed it a complex payroll report to have it generate a journal entry, and then we're gonna generate a dashboard and extract insights from it. Now, the first step in any close is gathering all the data, but when you're running this process with Claude, you need to give it a little bit more context. And I know that might seem like more work already, but remember, a couple extra minutes on this step will save you hours down the line. So beyond just pulling the relevant transactions, I'm also gonna be giving it the chart of accounts and one previous month's report so it knows exactly what I need to do and how we've coded things before. Now let me show you how simple this actually is. Now, just as an example here, we have a simple checking account bank statement. We have the same for 2 credit cards, and we have a complex payroll report that we're going to showcase in a little bit more detail when it makes sense. And as we mentioned, we want to also feed it the chart of accounts. Although if you wanted to and you had a Claude connector or specifically connected, you can say, hey, can you go ahead and pull the chart of accounts for the specific client I'm about to work on? Let's just say client 1. And because this has access to a custom connector that we've developed, you should be able to see its ability to both pull the data, write the data, and have you connect this to multiple clients at a time. As you can see, you know, here it, it can pull that up directly if needed. But again, if you don't have our connector just yet, you can just go ahead and paste your, paste a version of your set of accounts for that client instead. As the next step, I want to feed it some prior data. I happen to already have a general ledger downloaded from the prior month. Again, I'll just go here and paste it right here. But again, remember, if you happen to have our connector, you could pull this data directly and not have to copy-paste necessarily. Now, the next thing I'm gonna do, I'm gonna take the bank and credit card accounts specifically, and I'm just gonna drop those into Claude and just prompt it to say, hey, I've just shared with you an example of transactions from June and also all the bank and credit card statements for a client for July. Can you please go ahead and categorize all the transactions you can and just give me back a workbook or Excel with all the transactions listed in one place and all the respective categories based on the chart of accounts I provided earlier and taking as reference the general ledger for the prior month. Let's just drop that in and let's wait a few minutes, see what it comes up with. One side note here, as Claude is working, you'll notice that it creates a plan. It wants to extract all transactions, build a vendor-to-account mapping, categorize all of them, build the workbook, and verify the totals tied to the statements. So actually it's even taking care of the next step that I was about to recommend we walk through. So I'll just let it run and see where it lands at the end. So as you can see, actually has finished categorizing already. So it's going to be building the Excel workbook for me to take a quick look. Can you, instead of providing a workbook, just put it right here in the chat for me how you've categorized all transactions and the ones that you have been unable to categorize? So just some examples here that you can see: payroll clearing accounts, this is rent or leases, this is Pacific Gas and Electric, this is utilities, this is another utilities for phone, and so on and so on and Whenever you see deposit and transfers, those are ones that it's choosing not to categorize for obvious reasons. But this is just an example of how it can just very quickly through all the bank statements and credit card statements I've provided, just categorize all transactions. In this case, 117. So let's just mark the assets, the context, the patterns, the categorizations as identified or categorized already. I do know it had a plan to verify totals and tie that to statements. Let me ask it. Have you already tied the totals to statements? Can you recap please for me what you did there to ensure that everything ties out? And let's see what it comes up with. Now, if you want to speed up your client's monthly bookkeeping without learning how to set all of this up in Claude by yourself, that's exactly what we do at Opsir. And we've worked with over 100 firms to implement AI and automation to allow them to close their books in minutes where it previously took hours. So if that's something you're interested in for your own firm, but not sure how, or even if it would work for the clients you manage, feel free to book a call with us in the link in the description. During that call, we'll show you which parts of your month-end process you can confidently suddenly and securely hand off to AI and how much time your team can save by doing so. That way you'll know whether implementing something like this, it's even worth it. So if that's something you're interested in, feel free to just click the link below to book a call and let's just get back to the video. But after that, what we're going to do next is we're going to provide it a complex payroll report. We shared the report already earlier on the video. The idea is I wanted to make sure it's able to split the taxes, the payroll, split it up by departments as needed, which is often a process that certain organizations want as part of their accounting. So I'm going to go ahead and drop the payroll report. And while Claude is doing its thing, I'll say here, can you please now with the payroll report I just provided, create a journal entry where you are splitting it up by departments? Please share with me what that journal entry is going to look like before you just write it in the chat and then we'll talk through if I have any feedback. So as you can see here, it suggested here, this is the opening and the statement closing balance. And you can see how all of those effectively have zero differences. So it's been able to effectively consider all and pull all the transactions and verify that all of those are there in the books. It's coding. Now let's wait while it is analyzing the payroll data to create a journal entry that'll be able to send straight into the accounting software. And then from there, we'll just do a quick reporting and review exercise. So as you can see, in instances where you need additional data that won't come from the bank feed and you have like a payroll report, should be able to know based on your chart of accounts and your classes exactly how it can go about splitting that payroll appropriately and show you how that's done. What I can do here as well is tell it, can you actually go ahead and push this journal entry directly through QuickBooks through our custom QuickBooks connector and then show me a link so I can go ahead and check it in QuickBooks as well. And by the way, if you want access to our QuickBooks connector we developed that allows you to connect multiple client files and both read and write data, feel free to check that in the description as well. You can see how smart it is and saying, hey, is this the right client to begin with? And saying perfect classes exist with the right name. This is the correct company. Let me check about. It's kind of verifying that it will be able to do the job without an issue. So as you can see here, it posted a journal entry and gave me a link to it that I can open up. The link it provided me with, I can see right here, ID 147 has all of those journal entries. As expected, and even wrote a little bit of a memo to make sure this is easy for me to identify later on. Not bad. Lastly, I want to briefly create a report to share with the client and see if there's any insight they can learn from their financials for this month. Can you please go ahead and now create a simple visual of what this last month of financials looked like for this client in ways that's insightful for them, and then give them at least one money-saving tip and one money-making tip for them to keep in mind and take as a takeaway? away for this month of books. At the end, I want you to write the email that I would send to them linking to that resource and report, as well as noting what are the transactions that we were unable to categorize that you believe it's worth asking the client about because they might have the insight for it. So let's see, just kind of wrapping up the process here to give something to the client and see if there's anything they can share as well for the things that we couldn't categorize to kind of wrap things All right, so as you can see here, I have a simple-ish dashboard. Some of the metrics, I can see 61% of my expenses went into payroll. There's a significant chunk still identified, waiting for my input. This can also show the client, hey client, this is what we need your input. So please go ahead and tell us a little bit more about what are some of those transactions are about. But seeing the rest relatively minimal, seeing the payroll by departments, which would make sense for a company like this. We have a money-saving tip, get back to paying the cards in full. You had zero in June, but now you have these big balances. And a money-making tip: turn those finished installs into maintenance contracts. Interesting, something for the client to consider, and probably much better than what most clients get from their accountants, which is like an Excel or a PDF straight out of QuickBooks. It also drafted the email with some of the line items in terms of what these things are, to which customers, for the client to easily be able to provide that additional feedback. And then have those books ready to go. And that's exactly how a full month of books goes from raw transactions to finished reconciled set of financials with a report for the client without taking days of your time. But monthly bookkeeping is just one of the processes that you can automate and speed up with Claude. If you'd like to see even more ways accounting firms are transforming their delivery times with AI, watch this video next and where I break it all down. I'll see you there. And until then, stay efficient.