I’ve been frustrated with the bookkeeping process for my small business for 10+ years.

My situation is strange — 3 entities, a few rentals, and multiple online business projects.

This means each of those entities needs financial statements.

I’ve never had a clear path for this [and to top it off, I choose to have multiple credit cards and banks — shoutout to my newest account at Mercury, a tech platform layered on a bank — you can get $250 free if you want to open an account].

I’ve tested multiple bookkeeping softwares that haven’t been a good fit.

I settled on having an international bookkeeping service.

I’ve done this for years, but even it frustrates me (mostly my fault).

Because I’m always looking in the past at transactions, they send me a big spreadsheet with questions about transactions.

Because so much time passes between, I rarely know the answers.

But finally, I think AI is getting good enough to help.

So I’m testing out a few things.

First, I launched a Claude project — I’m planning to drop all my credit card and bank statements in and see if it can generate reports similar to those from my current bookkeepers.

And while chatting about this project with my buddy Claude, I discovered that Plaid now has a free trial plan (which doesn’t appear to be listed on their pricing page).

I applied for my trial account less than an hour ago and should hear back in 2-3 business day.

I’ll get 10 connections for free.

My plan?

See if I can make my own personal finance app that can pull in my data.

My hope?

Finally have a monthly P&L and cash flow statement that I can review to help me look ahead instead of doing the financials in arrears for tax returns.

I’m hopeful, and I’ll keep you posted!

Have you done something similar?

If so, let me know!

If you haven’t used Google Search Console in a while, here’s a nice little bonus.

You can now add the following web properties — Instagram, TikTok, X, and YouTube.

What does this mean?

You can now see what search terms from Google traffic is sending traffic to those platforms.

Pretty cool!

Recently I was coding my son’s business website (shoutout Great White Pressure Washing!), and I noticed something.

Not only do the current coding models listen to fixes and changes, but they also make powerful suggestions that are improvements.

Here’s what I mean.

I asked to remove a few service areas from our homepage.

Not only did it do that, but it reasoned through the rest of the website copy and found the other mentions.

But that’s not all!

It then thought about an article we have on the site that talks about salt air being corrosive for beach homes.

But it (correctly) decides that salt air can affect bay homes as well and redirects the focus of that article to those areas.

One request from me.

But wise thinking and multiple changes from the development side.

Here’s more of that reasoning if you’d like to have a look…

And just a heads up, it’s only going to get smarter from here 😉🤯

Last week, I shared the growth of a directory site that I built a few month back and forgot about.

You can read more about it here: I forgot about this website for 3 months

If you want to get a deep dive into watching how I work with Claude Code to build sites, this video is for you 👇

Other projects I’ll update over time (or provide future updates) include…

If I can help your business apply AI and reduce friction, don’t hesitate to reach out.

Until next time!