I run a small business. I used AI to do book keeping for my LLC with two members (I have a partner). We had used a bookkeeper in previous years but we couldn’t ignore the potential cost savings of using AI. We have a CPA who said the books look great so we will likely no longer need a human to do book keeping. We were able to cancel Quickbooks because of this. Quickbooks (andvanced plan) alone was $3k/year in savings.
Claude for Small Business
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Re: Claude for Small Business
#292Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suspect that the time spent on accounting or the money spent on accountants will influence decisions made by small-small business owners (1-5 staff range), in that some will take these risks. Admin is a huge pain for very small businesses.
Accountants can be expensive, especially if your books are messy, or have poor accounting practices from the start. Systems like quickbooks, hubspot, payment processors all have tiers where yes on paper they make it easy to properly setup good accounting practices, but you’ll spend an additional 500/month+ to get those features. Hiring an accountant to clean up the books and do quarterly book keeping is equally as ex…
I dont think they are expensive. I pay 150 eur/month for closing books and payroll with 3 employees. My accountant offered to do the bookkeeping as well for 250 extra. Its a pain to do but not 250 eur pain so I do it myself
Re: Claude for Small Business
#293Earlier quoted context omitted.
Play the ball, not the man, dude. Hectoring people on the Internet because you're stressed out about something isn't going to magically fix how you feel. Digging into their profile to make it personal is three steps too far.
We are talking about one person's introduction of a technology to persons and the implications of that action within the framework of enterprise governance and risk, it is one in the same. If anything, who a person is, their knowledge of the domain and the associated implications that action has on the domain has relevancy where someone who is ignorant of implications may have more grace than someone who has the expe…
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Re: Claude for Small Business
#294[flagged]
Re: Claude for Small Business
#295> PayPal powers settlements, invoicing, disputes, and refunds inside Claude. > Intuit QuickBooks handles payroll planning, the monthly close, and cash-flow, along with tools to help businesses prepare for tax season, and reconciliation work that touches every other system. I can't wait for the horror stories, this is going to be fun. Remember last month when Anthropic was like: no, we're not going to refund you even…
For a preview of how this will go, take a look at this:
Re: Claude for Small Business
#296I'm increasingly convinced that there's a killer app waiting for whoever can come up with a UI that makes claude code or codex accessible to the average user. Onboarding my non-software engineer teammates to it has super-charged them and essentially given them all their own personal developer that can automate tasks for them. Managing codebases, etc. is still a hassle though. 90% of the power of Excel was that it was…
> that makes claude code or codex accessible to the average user That's what they aim Claude Cowork at. Every executive/leader I've shown Claude Cowork to has gone from 'what is AI' to 'vibecoding whole apps' in weeks. Then when Claude is down for an hour, they get visibly angry and don't remember how to do anything pre-Claude :) I understand the impulse to provide a UI to manage codebases, etc. But my observation is…
Haha I can't even trust developers who know the dangers of what they're doing to vibe code responsibly
Re: Claude for Small Business
#297Earlier quoted context omitted.
As someone in this situation myself who has used AI tools, Claude Code/Codex are useful for doing certain laborious tasks like bookkeeping errors/reconciliation issues but they don't replace a professional accountant. It's not just about being able to balance Xero but knowing rules, procedures and the way the tax office works.
For how long though? I like my accountant, but I use Claude Code enough to know the SOTA and potential, read through the Claude for Small Business skills and texted a friend "How long do you think accountants have?" - an Aussie half-wog
The point of an accountant is accountability. Its in the name. Who do you go after if Claude messes up your books?
Re: Claude for Small Business
#298Re: Claude for Small Business
#299There is going to be so many horror stories that will come from this, ie. Claude overpaid/underpaid my employees, Claude hallucinated the tax code and now the IRS is seizing my assets. etc… Murphy’s Law is undefeated. Add in a psycophantic hallucination black box to critical business data and you have a recipe for hilarity. Normies cannot be trusted to hand off these functions to an LLM because they are mostly incapa…
Certified AI Auditor jobs incoming.
Re: Claude for Small Business
#300> PayPal powers settlements, invoicing, disputes, and refunds inside Claude. > Intuit QuickBooks handles payroll planning, the monthly close, and cash-flow, along with tools to help businesses prepare for tax season, and reconciliation work that touches every other system. I can't wait for the horror stories, this is going to be fun. Remember last month when Anthropic was like: no, we're not going to refund you even…
For a preview of how this will go, take a look at this: https://accounting.penrose.com/
Here’s what’s crazy: by making this widely available to SMB, they will soon have enough training data to beat this benchmark —- in probably less than a year is my guess.