How to use AI as your bookkeeper and junior financial analystby Derek Lidow Last week we described how AI makes a productive but naive intern assistant. As long as you explain carefully what you want it to research or what forms you want it to find and fill out for you, it will do the work as reliably as any recent college graduate. This week we want to explain how useful AI is as a bookkeeper and junior financial analyst. Again, the key is to explain exactly what you want. For example, we find AIs are very good at presenting information and organizing information. We use AI to create spreadsheets and direct it to populate the spreadsheet with specified information. This can be very powerful for people that do not like math. Even if you do like math, it eliminates a huge amount of grunge work in setting up the spreadsheet and also when finding and plugging in numbers. Open AI has a special version for preparing Excel spreadsheets and analyzing data (just press the Other GPTs dropdown button in the sidebar and you will see it). You can ask it to set up a spreadsheet that tracks your expenditures and receipts and it will do that in about one minute. If you then upload copies of all the invoices you pay and all the deposits you make, it will keep track of your bank balances. If you tell it what expenses will be recurring and what one-off expenses you expect to pay, it will calculate how long you have until you hit a zero bank balance. We are particularly excited by the capabilities of Claude CoWork, which can be trained to perform a specific skill by just explaining the skill and giving it some sample inputs. You then tell it how well it performed the skill and how it could perform it better. You’ll likely need to repeat giving it more sample inputs to help it improve some more; you may have to repeat this cycle a few times. This can take a few hours to do because you need to create the examples and then help it understand its mistakes as you help it iterate to do the task better and better. For example, if you are running a cafe, you can train Claude CoWork to create your restocking orders for you. It calls this a SKILL. You explain in plain English how you decide what to order based upon how much inventory you have and what have been your recent sales. CoWork will then prepare an easy-to-use front end where you enter basic information, or where you upload an inventory spreadsheet and a listing of the previous week’s sales (AI can capture data in almost any form you want to use). You then can test the program by inputting actual information from some prior weeks and comparing what Claude recommended with what you actually ordered. You can then tell CoWork in plain English what it got right and what it got wrong and it will adjust its program accordingly. Claude CoWork can get rid of lots of repetitive grunge work. With the good things AI can do for a startup founder, for free or for a nominal $20 per month, entrepreneurs have a ready-made equivalent of a college-educated personal assistant and a spreadsheet savvy bookkeeper and financial analyst on their team. No founder should waste time doing tasks AI can do for them; founders have way more important things to do. With gratitude, Derek and Ben P.S. If you like what we’re doing, please consider recommending this newsletter to another person you think would benefit from us. It really helps us build out our free content platform.
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