I’ve given it access to my small business books for the last few months (attended sessions only) and so far it’s helped me clean up countless errors made by humans, at the expense of a small handful of duplicated transactions that got shaken out pretty quickly.
How do you know those duplicates are the only errors it made? You weren't aware of the apparently countless human errors before, so how would you be aware of Claude's errors?
Redundant verification is built into the workflow, both at the agent-instruction level and downstream. Reconciling a monthly bank statement with your account register in QuickBooks, for example, has the benefit of making sure you haven’t omitted transactions or added phantom ones, and once you finish reconciling a period you lock the register to prevent further changes. I supervise mutations closely and can relax my oversight when I know there are redundant checks for correctness downstream.
The class of human errors I’m encountering most often are ones caused by missing context: misfiling of transactions because my bookkeeper didn’t recognize a vendor, didn’t know a transaction needed to be attached to a specific project or client, lacked access to my calendar, didn’t have my login to pull receipts, didn’t have time to understand a spreadsheet. Claude has ready access to all of these has been remarkably adept at synthesizing that to help it come at accounting tasks with a level of detailed-oriented obsessiveness that no human I’ve ever hired has shown.
It's a fascinating angle they've taken to give Claude your payroll. I guess we've reached this part of the AI race and they're running ahead of people realizing what it can do.
Preparing payroll is different from running payroll. A human should still have to review it, as it’s the person running it (and the employer) that’s liable.
