Every quarter I used to lose an entire afternoon to the same ritual. Dig through emails, download PDFs, open bank statements, match invoices to transactions, sort business from personal, convert USD and EUR to AUD, file everything into folders my tax person understands. It’s the kind of work that makes you question your life choices.
I run a small operation. Invoices arrive by email in three currencies. Receipts come as PDFs, photos of paper, forwarded attachments. Some are from Anthropic in US dollars, some from German clients in euros, some from the local office supply shop in AUD. Each one needs to be read, categorised, and filed in a way that survives an ATO audit.
So I built a tool that watches my billing inbox. When something arrives, it extracts the document, sends it through Claude Haiku for parsing (one API call per invoice, pennies per document) and drops it into the right folder with the right metadata. Business or personal. Which client. Which currency, converted at the correct RBA rate. GST extracted where applicable.
It runs on my Mac Mini. Nobody else sees the data. The receipts never leave my machine except for that single API call to extract the fields, and even that could run locally if I wanted to trade speed for privacy.
The whole point was to turn a quarterly afternoon into nothing. Not into a faster afternoon. Into no afternoon at all. That time now goes to walking through Newcastle, which is a better use of a Tuesday.
This handles the incoming side. For the outgoing side, creating invoices and tracking payments, I built a separate tool that reads my calendar and does the rest.