Everyone is doing magic with Claude. And most accounting firms are not very comfortable unleashing it. Rightfully so.

Let me show you some of the magic I do with Claude. Then I'll tell you what I think you should do with it to keep safe. Then how you can get started too.

The magic I do with Claude

Every morning when I start my day, I have a Mission Control page open on my screen. This one is a duplicate of my real one, with all the figures, numbers and names randomised. Cladue opens it full screen over night so I don’t get distracted by emails and my messages when I get in and get started.

On it:

A daily brief. For every meeting, some research on the person I'm meeting if I don't know them, and our history together if I do. And coach's notes, because there is a coach in there learning from our interactions how to coach me well.

My monthly overview, my objectives, how I'm tracking, my daily wins.

My news briefs, on the topics I care about, fresh every day, in the style I like it.

My weekly content briefs, which harvest my meetings and give me weekly insights on the questions people asked this week, the themes coming up, the interesting things I said one-on-one that I should share with the world. All these gold nuggets that are easy to forget.

My automation logs, because I have a few dozen automations running every night. It tells me everything is okay, and highlights if there is an exception I need to look at.

And my KPI dashboard. My favourite part is the profit and loss. It's organised in the order I like, with the groupings I like, governed by me and Claude, regardless of how it sits in my accounting app. The bottom lines are all correct, the same as in Xero, but the expenses are sorted into the buckets that make sense to me.

My board, my CFO, my bookkeeper, my auditor

Here is the bit I love most.

I have Claude processes for a board, a CFO, a bookkeeper and an auditor.

Every night, my board and my auditor review my financials and highlight anything they have a question about. When there is a question, the CFO takes it to the bookkeeper and tries to answer it from the data. If they work it out, they just leave me a note. "Cost of sales lifted in March. What drove it? Two interstate keynotes, flights and venue."

When they can't answer it themselves, the note turns amber, and it becomes a question for me. Awaiting your answer. I go in, answer it, and the note is locked and kept.

I love this. I love that I can change it every day. Every time something isn't quite how I want it, I say "Claudy, let's change that," and we do.

So should you do this?

If you are a very small business, yes. Claude can give you so much power. It can create the employees you cannot otherwise hire.

But if I ran a firm of ten, thirty, fifty, a hundred people, knowing the power of Claude, I would not hand every one of them a Claude licence.

Notice how conservative I am with my own business. I let Claude get me information and interpret it. There are very few places I let it actually update my data. And I don’t (yet?) let it go and reconcile my accounting file. I could. The technology is easily there. It can log into websites, submit forms on my behalf, reconcile, record, change, send emails. I choose not to let it. Not yet.

If I had fifty people accessing my systems, there is no easy way I could control, or even know, what each of them did with their Claude licence.

Copilot is a different story. The main tools are far more limited, there are far more guardrails. The power tools are tucked away. It would have been much, much harder to build what I built with Claude inside Copilot. But I would sleep at night, knowing that my team, all eager to get good work done fast, have access to different parts of it, capable of different levels of AI agency, and not more than I'm comfortable with.

Want to do this together?

Inside the AI with Inbal Club I show everyone exactly how I build everything I build. And because there is so much interest in Claude right now, we are starting a Claude training stream on top of our Copilot stream.

At our in-person days in Melbourne and Sydney we will focus mostly on Copilot, with a quick look at these Claude capabilities too, so everyone in the room understands how it works and where it's all going.

Join us in the Club at inbal.com.au/aiclub. Or come and work with me in person for a full day in Sydney or Melbourne this August at inbal.com.au/events.

I'll see you there.

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Inbal Rodnay

Guiding Firms in AI Adoption and Automation

Keynote speaker | AI Workshops | Executive briefings | The Tech Savvy Firm

When you are ready, here is how Inbal can help:

The magic I do with Claude (and why I'm still careful)