Monthly Income Tracking With AI
Income treands, compiled on a dashboard.
Every month, I get a monthly profit and loss report from my bookkeeper. It’s very detailed (as it should be), showing every income and expense category.
For myself, I prepare a monthly recap of data from all aspects of my business, including key financial data. I set up a process in Claude to incorporate financial data into this recap.
What this automation does
A Claude scheduled task runs at the start of each month and pulls profit and loss data directly from QuickBooks, which is what my accounting team uses and the same source for the PDF profit and loss I receive.
I’m incredibly protective of my financial data and don’t want anything sensitive transferred to an LLM. The QuickBooks connection to my profit and loss is read-only and can’t access any account information or transaction data.
Originally, I was having Claude read the PDF that my bookkeeper sends, but that was a really fragile process — a lot could “break” and cause Claude not to be able to access the PDF or parse it correctly. Finally, I decided that a direct connection to QuickBooks was better.
Tools
- Claude (scheduled task)
- QuickBooks connector for Claude
- Notion* [affiliate link]
Step 1: Pull financial data from QuickBooks
On the first of the month, Claude connects to my profit and loss data in QuickBooks. It pulls the most recent month-end data, plus historical data from the past three months to compare.
Step 2: Summarize income information
In QuickBooks, my income data is detailed into many categories, depending on the source. For my rollup, I want a summary of just three categories. Claude does the math, and then double-checks to make sure the totals match QuickBooks.
Step 3: Refresh the dashboard in Notion
In Notion, I have a dashboard of my income data for the three income categories. Claude writes the new month’s data to the dashboard.
Step 4: Add an income summary to the monthly recap
My full monthly check-in from Claude pulls a lot of data, including website metrics and social media engagement. Along with the other data, Claude writes my income data to a new page in Notion for the monthly recap. It also includes trend information from the historical financial data: is income in each category going up, down, or holding steady?
The completed monthly recap is saved to Notion, and I receive an email notification that it’s ready for review.
