Use cases
Claude for accounting work
You have seen the five shapes and how some of them work on the tax side. Here is the accounting side. The same process applies here: Claude does the drafting, the explaining, the reformatting, the first guess. You do the judgment and deciding.
Start with the message you send some version of at month-end close: chasing a client for what a transaction was.
I have a handful of transactions in a client's books I cannot place. Draft a short, friendly email asking what each was for, formatted as a quick list they can easily respond to. [upload transactions]
Hi [client]
We are wrapping up your books and ran into a few transactions we could not categorize on our end. Could you reply with what each of these was for? 1. [date, amount, vendor]. 2. [date, amount, vendor]. 3. [date, amount, vendor]. Once we have these answers we will be able to close out the books for the month.
Next, the self-review at the end of a close. You have your monthly financials and statements that you want to make sure reconcile.
I have a first draft of this client's monthly financials along with the associated bank and credit card statements. Please double check that the statements reconcile to the financials, and flag any variances. The final output should be an Excel workbook.
I have reviewed the financials and the statements, then subsequently generated an Excel workbook with my findings. All the statements reconcile to the financials, except for Chase 1234 which is off by $357.98. Since I am unable to see the year to date financials, I am unable to confirm if this is a timing difference or an omission.
Third, the data that arrives in the wrong shape.
A client sent last year's transactions as a set of PDF bank statements. I need the transactions listed in an Excel file with these columns: date, description, amount. [upload PDFs]
I transformed the PDF bank statements into an Excel file that lists every transaction. One row needs your attention. Row 14 has a date I could not parse, so I left it as-is rather than guess.
The last one is the one to be most careful with, and it is the most tempting to hand off completely. Claude can suggest categories. It cannot see the receipts, the client's chart of accounts, or what the client actually meant. Notice how the prompt forces it to show its uncertainty instead of hiding it.
Here is a list of uncategorized expenses with the vendor and memo for each. Suggest a likely category for each, and flag the ones you are unsure about so I know what to confirm. [upload file]
I split these into ones I am fairly confident on and ones you should confirm. Confident: CPS Energy to Utilities, the monthly restaurant association charge to Dues and Subscriptions. Confirm these: the Amazon charge could be office supplies, equipment, or inventory depending on what was bought, and the payment to a personal name could be a contractor. I cannot see the receipts or this client's chart of accounts, so the flagged ones need your confirmation.
Look at what Claude actually did across those four. It drafted a chase email, checked a reconciliation, reshaped a file, and suggested categories. In every one, you are the person who sends the email, resolves the variance, checks the flagged rows, and posts the entries. That last example is the sharp edge: a confident category guess that is wrong, posted without a check, is exactly the kind of error the next module is about. On the books, the confirming is not optional.