Birbla

Join the discussion

Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.

Sign in
  • Hacker News
  • > PayPal powers settlements, invoicing, disputes, and refunds inside Claude.

    > Intuit QuickBooks handles payroll planning, the monthly close, and cash-flow, along with tools to help businesses prepare for tax season, and reconciliation work that touches every other system.

    I can't wait for the horror stories, this is going to be fun. Remember last month when Anthropic was like: no, we're not going to refund you even though we admit we're in the wrong for anti-competitively burning credits? These are some of the last things I would trust an LLM with in a small business and on top of it Anthropic has shitty customer support. I will actively be telling prospects to avoid.

    by windexh8er
  • I run a small business. I used AI to do book keeping for my LLC with two members (I have a partner). We had used a bookkeeper in previous years but we couldn’t ignore the potential cost savings of using AI. We have a CPA who said the books look great so we will likely no longer need a human to do book keeping. We were able to cancel Quickbooks because of this. Quickbooks (andvanced plan) alone was $3k/year in savings.
    by riddlemethat
  • I run a s business (small if you compare it to tech companies).

    I can tell you the drag is between your own tools and the real world (which is very messy and inconsistent): taxes, compliance, payroll, amendments, share structures, etc.

    Within my island, my books are in order, invoices and time keeping is fully automated, calendars and sales pipelines are connected.

    I'm sure there are many businesses whose inner islands are not as orderly. The zillion tools out there all try to bring equanimity to the chaos and yet here we still are with fresh books, quickbooks, and xero...

    by jryio
  • So this is explicitly for users/businesses held captive by big tech services and tools, which I guess is a very American way of working for SMB's. Seeing what this could 'automate' for my (European) company, this saves very little time?

    Payroll/reconciliation is already a couple of clicks and 2 humans sign off. A 'morning brief', well lol.

    'Growth', how would you not know your numbers as an SMB? Everything is already in a tool with dashboards and reports for people to act on.

    Also, I have zero confidence in the example prompt.

    This all seems incredibly uninspired.

    by michelb
  • By coincidence, I've looked yesterday a small documentary [1] about the people tagging all those invoices to train theses models. For 120 €/month they are reading about 1000 to 4000 invoices per day and check and tag them for AI training.

    [1] https://www.arte.tv/en/videos/126831-000-A/arte-reportage/

    by hommelix
  • I understand why this is a good idea. I have Claude Code hooked up to my mail synced via IMAP, my Mercury read-only token, and beancount, and it gets almost all of my invoices and categorizes them. The tedious portion for a lot of this is:

    * find invoice I_E for expense E

    * associate and categorize E based on I_E and transaction field

    These things are annoying but Claude Code is great at it and it leaves a much smaller set I have to manually resolve. This is a class of problems that are tractable and checkable, which I happily use LLMs on. If it miscategorizes it, I'm going to see it because I'm looking over the accounts. In fact, I was previously using a different accounting app which had poor API support, so I dumped it so I could use Claude and it's incredible how much this helps me.

    There is an enormous number of use-cases that Claude/GPT are good for and the hard part is market penetration here. As an example, my dad was looking at some statistical health survey data in India and working out what things you could glean from it. Claude identified the things that would complicate his analysis in no time. He's 70 years old, and he'd done it all manually until he asked me (I've got a Mathematics degree) if something made statistical sense to do. I told him what it likely was and then asked him to try Claude. Knocked out his work and mine in moments. But he didn't think to use it. Now I have to get him a ChatGPT/Claude subscription.

    It's like how if you go to the Datadog pricing page they don't list a feature set. They have all these use-case lists with prices. You can build things using their base metrics functionality and logs functionality but showing the use-cases must have more adoption.

    by arjie
  • You are absolutely right. I shouldn’t have paid that invoice from ScamInc. Would you like me to help you file for bankruptcy?
    by fnoef
  • I'm increasingly convinced that there's a killer app waiting for whoever can come up with a UI that makes claude code or codex accessible to the average user.

    Onboarding my non-software engineer teammates to it has super-charged them and essentially given them all their own personal developer that can automate tasks for them. Managing codebases, etc. is still a hassle though.

    90% of the power of Excel was that it was functionally a database that a normal person could actually use. I think we'll see something similar with coding agents.

    by CSMastermind

Explore Birbla archives