Tag: Finance Operations

I’m a Chartered Accountant. Here’s How I Actually Use Claude Cowork

Let me walk you through an audit assignment I recently worked on, where I used Claude Cowork to analyse the finance data of a growing services company.

The setup was fairly typical for a fast-growing business. Around 35 contractors across different countries, four active clients, and roughly $40,000 in monthly payouts.

The company had scaled quickly, but the finance side was still heavily manual – invoicing, validations, payment checks, everything. The founders knew something was off with the numbers, but they couldn’t pinpoint where the problem was or how much it was costing them.

I worked with a dataset that included seven interconnected tabs: vendor rosters, platform-logged hours, invoiced hours, payment records, client billing, and cost structures.

The objective was straightforward: identify the issues, quantify the financial impact, and put together a report the founders could actually use.

*(The specifics – names, numbers, and identifying details – have been changed to maintain confidentiality. The nature of the findings and the process are real.) *

Anyone who has worked in accounting knows how this kind of exercise usually goes. You open the workbook, start matching IDs across sheets, build VLOOKUPs, run reconciliation checks, create pivots, and keep moving back and forth between tabs trying to make sure nothing gets missed. It’s important work, but it’s also repetitive and mentally exhausting when the data starts getting large.

This time, I chose to approach it differently. I used Claude Cowork alongside my own review process.

A Quick Word on Claude Cowork

For those unfamiliar – it’s Anthropic’s desktop tool where Claude Cowork works directly on your files. You connect a folder (see the screenshot below), and it reads your spreadsheets, runs scripts, cross-references data, and generates outputs.

No copy-pasting into a chat window.

Think of it as a very fast analyst sitting next to you who never loses track of which tab they were on.

How the Audit Worked

I want to be clear about one thing: I didn’t just hand over the data and wait for Claude Cowork to do the work. I was running my own checks simultaneously – the way any accountant would. Roster matching, duplicate detection, hours reconciliation.

I wanted to keep my own judgment and experience as the base, and see whether Claude Cowork would arrive at similar findings.

Normally, the first pass through a dataset like this takes time. You spend a good while understanding how the tabs connect, tracing data flows, and figuring out where inconsistencies might sit.

Claude Cowork handled that part in a few minutes and immediately flagged that the vendor count in the payment ledger didn’t match the roster. I had already started noticing the same issue manually.

But here’s what surprised me. Claude Cowork didn’t just confirm my findings – it went further. It picked up things that a human eye, scanning rows one by one, would very likely miss. A lot of the findings matched mine.

But Claude Cowork also picked up things that would have been easy to miss manually.

What We Found

The overpayments themselves were relatively small. The bigger issue was the billing error.

For three months, one client had been invoiced at rates lower than what had actually been agreed in the contract. Nobody had caught it because nobody was consistently checking billed rates against contracted rates. That single issue alone had a revenue impact of more than $55,000!

There was also a wider mismatch between platform-tracked work and client billing, which meant the margin reporting the company relied on wasn’t fully reliable either.

The Output

The final report ranked the issues by severity, quantified the financial impact, and separated findings into data gaps, process gaps, and control failures.

Claude Cowork helped accelerate the analysis significantly, but the final decisions – what to prioritise, what to simplify, what needed attention immediately, and what could wait – came from experience.

What Claude Cowork Did Well – And What It Couldn’t Do

One thing Claude Cowork did particularly well was handling volume.

It cross-referenced all seven tabs together, checked patterns across months, and flagged anomalies quickly. For example, it identified a vendor reporting the exact same hours repeatedly over multiple months – the kind of pattern that can easily slip past someone manually reviewing spreadsheets for long periods.

In a normal workflow, catching something like that means building a separate comparison sheet, adding variance formulas and scanning for zeros. But Claude Cowork surfaced it while doing the rest of the analysis.

Where it still fell short was turning those findings into something the founders would actually sit down and read. Claude Cowork could find everything and even sort it by type, whether it was a data issue, a process gap, or a people problem.

What it couldn’t do was decide what belongs on page one and what goes in an appendix of this audit report. It kept repeating context. It buried urgent findings behind paragraphs of background.

It didn’t know that the CEO reads the first half-page and decides from there whether to keep going.

Writing for leadership is a specific skill. You need to know what matters, how much detail is enough, and how to be precise without being long.

That part – the prioritisation, structure, and judgment of what a five-minute read should contain – was where I took over.

AI is very good at finding things. The professional is essential for deciding what to say, and how

What’s Changed – And What Hasn’t

If you work in finance and the AI conversation makes you uneasy, I get it. I’ve been there. But having used it on real data, here’s what I’ve realised: AI doesn’t replace the accountant. It replaces the hours of mechanical work that usually eats up most of the accountant’s time.

This audit would have taken me two to three days the traditional way. With Claude Cowork, the heavy lifting took an afternoon.

The time I got back went into understanding root causes, assessing control gaps, and writing recommendations – the work that actually requires experience and judgment.

The tools are changing. VLOOKUPs and pivot tables served us well, and they still have their place. But for work that involves matching data across multiple large datasets, spotting patterns, and reconciling at speed – there are now better options.

The accountants and analysts who learn to use them won’t be replaced by AI. They’ll be the ones doing in an afternoon what used to take a week.

Why Finance Teams Struggle Without SOPs

SOPs, or Standard Operating Procedures, are written guidelines for carrying out routine work so that tasks are handled consistently, regardless of who is doing them.

In very small businesses, SOPs often feel unnecessary because the volume of work is manageable, teams are small, and everyone works in close coordination. Founders are usually involved in most decisions, and many things get done through informal discussions and shared understanding.

The challenge begins as the business grows. Teams expand, new hires join, responsibilities get distributed, and founders can no longer stay involved in every detail. What earlier worked through informal coordination starts breaking down, and finance teams begin to struggle. Tasks still get done, but not smoothly. Follow-ups are missed, numbers don’t always match, and routine work starts taking longer than it should because too much depends on individuals rather than clear processes.

Finance teams usually feel this strain first because finance sits at the centre of operations. Invoicing, collections, payroll, payments, compliance, and reporting are all interconnected, and even a small gap in one area quickly affects another.

A simple example from finance operations

Let me share a simple example from practice:

A delay in raising an invoice often leads to delayed collections. That delay in invoicing usually happens because the required inputs are not received on time, or because responsibility for follow-ups is not clearly defined.

In the absence of a clear SOP, teams are often unsure about the exact steps involved or who owns each part of the process. The issue is not about individual capability or effort, but about the lack of documented instruction and ownership.

Delayed collections then affect cash flow, which can have a significant impact on a growing business.

This is usually the point where businesses realise that informal coordination is no longer enough. Clear SOPs become a necessary and often non-negotiable part of running day-to-day finance operations smoothly.

Why experience alone doesn’t solve this

Faced with these delays and inconsistencies, many businesses assume that the solution is to hire more experienced people. While experience helps professionals handle problems when they arise, it doesn’t prevent the same issues from repeating as volumes grow and more people get involved.

Without clear SOPs, common issues start showing up:

  • Two people handle the same task differently
  • Important checks get skipped during busy periods
  • New team members take longer to settle in because expectations aren’t clearly defined

Over time, this inconsistency creates confusion and duplication of work – even in teams that are otherwise capable and hardworking.

What SOPs actually do in day-to-day finance work

SOPs are often misunderstood as long documents created only for audits or compliance. In reality, effective SOPs are simple working guides.

They answer practical questions like:

  • When does this activity start?
  • What information is needed before beginning?
  • Who prepares the work, who reviews it, and who approves it?
  • What checks are critical?
  • What should happen if something doesn’t look right?

In practice, this could mean something as simple as defining who collects billing inputs, by when, and in what format; or clearly laying down when payroll data is frozen and who signs off exceptions. These small clarities remove a surprising amount of day-to-day confusion.

Why SOPs matter even more in remote and growing teams

When teams work remotely or in delivery-driven setups, people are not sitting together at the same location. Operations are largely cloud-based, and communication happens through emails, messages, or scheduled calls, which means small gaps may not be immediately noticed.

Without clear structure and documented steps, work can easily stall or move inconsistently. For example, the invoicing team may be waiting for inputs from another team, or payroll processing may be blocked due to missing approvals.

In such scenarios, SOPs act as a shared reference point that everyone can rely on. They allow work to move forward without constant follow-ups, make handovers smoother, and reduce dependency on specific individuals. They also make onboarding easier, because new team members know what is expected from the start.

Moving from firefighting to reliability

In my practical experience, I have often seen finance professionals take pride in being able to “manage somehow” when things get difficult. Being calm under pressure and fixing issues as they come up are valuable skills. However, relying only on individual firefighting over time becomes exhausting and risky.

SOPs help ease this burden. When processes are clearly defined and documented, work continues smoothly even when people are busy, unavailable, or change roles.

In the long run, strong finance operations are not about how much one person can handle. They are about how consistently the work gets done, month after month, as the business grows.

What comes next

This article focuses on why SOPs matter as businesses scale. In another article, I plan to share how an SOP was set up for invoicing in practice, and the difference it made.