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Bruno Ashford @brunoashfordSubscribeModule 9 · Lesson 9.3 · 12 min
Finance: Cash Flow and Reconciliation
Organise bank statements, categorise expenses and build a simple cash flow view, with a human review step that catches every mistake before it matters.
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1Export, never connect your bank login
Download the last month of transactions from your bank as CSV and save it in finance/bank. Do not give the agent online banking credentials, ever. Exported files are enough and they keep the blast radius small.
mkdir -p finance/bank finance/invoices finance/reports2Create your chart of categories
Give Claude the categories your accountant already uses, so the output drops straight into your books. Add known vendors and how they should be categorised; this is the memory that makes the next month faster.
Create finance/categories.md with our expense and income categories (copy them from our accountant's chart of accounts in finance/chart-of-accounts.csv) and a vendor map: which supplier names always go to which category. Leave a section for rules we learn over time.3Categorise and reconcile with a confidence flag
Ask Claude to categorise each transaction, match income to invoices, and give every line a confidence level. Anything below high confidence goes into a review list for a human. This single rule is what makes the process safe.
Read finance/bank/2026-08.csv. For each transaction, suggest a category from finance/categories.md, match incoming payments to invoices in finance/invoices, and add a confidence column (high, medium, low). Put every medium or low line in a separate review list with your reasoning. Save the result as finance/reports/2026-08-reconciliation.csv. Do not change any source file.4Review, correct and teach
Go through the review list yourself or with your bookkeeper. Every correction you make, tell Claude to add as a rule in the vendor map. After two or three months the review list shrinks dramatically.
I corrected these lines: the payment to Brightline Ltd is Software, not Marketing, and transfers from J. Patel are loan repayments, not revenue. Update the vendor map in finance/categories.md so you get it right next time.5Build an eight-week cash view
With categorised history, ask for a simple forward view: opening cash, expected receipts from open invoices, known fixed costs and payroll. Keep it simple and clearly labelled as a projection, not a forecast you would show a bank.
Using the last three months of categorised transactions and the open invoices, build an eight-week cash projection: opening balance, expected receipts by week, fixed costs, payroll and closing balance. List every assumption at the top and highlight any week where the balance drops below 20,000.Most owners know their revenue. Far fewer know, on a Tuesday afternoon, how many weeks of cash they have left. The reason is simple: reconciliation is tedious, so it gets done late, by someone tired, once a month if you are lucky.
Claude Code can do the tedious part in minutes: read your bank CSV, match transactions to invoices, suggest a category for each line and project the next eight weeks. What it must never do is become your accountant of record or touch your bank account. You give it exported files, it gives you a draft, and a human signs off. That is the whole design.
Key points
- Exported files only; the agent never touches your bank login.
- A confidence flag turns a risky task into a safe one.
- Every correction becomes a rule, so the review list shrinks.
- A projection is a management tool, not your official books.
Avoid
- Letting the agent overwrite the original bank export.
- Treating the categorised file as final without human sign-off.
- Inventing new categories that do not match your accountant's chart.
- Presenting a rough projection to a lender as if it were audited.
A roofing company in Ohio with about 1.4 million dollars in annual revenue did reconciliation in a two-day scramble before each quarterly tax payment. The office manager now runs the categorisation monthly: Claude handles roughly 85 percent of lines with high confidence and she reviews the rest in about 40 minutes. The eight-week cash view showed a gap in late November caused by three large jobs paying on 60-day terms, so the owner asked for deposits on the next two contracts. That was the first winter they did not dip into the credit line.