I’m struggling with the concept that I’m not in myself running a business. I sit on the other end of the table, imagine I’m the municipality that orders construction drawings, rules for quality and much more, and I send out for tenders. It’s almost the reverse of a business but not at the same time. I apply for permits from the government, from environmental to building permits, and I hire companies to do the work. So when I’m looking at making my setups in section 3, it seems much more difficult to map my needs. Being that enough of my work can be deemed “sensitive” I will need to be selective in what an AI is able to read and get its hands on. So I’m getting really stuck. I can see how making letters to the public or checklists for quality control can be “automated” but that doesn’t save much time really. Most of those templates are easy to come by.

This is my first major win applying what @Jake Van Clief ef teaches. Since subscribing to Claude Code on March 19th, I’ve been able to show so much progress that my company has now upgraded me to the Max 5x subscription. Looking forward to pushing the boundaries of what’s possible and continuing to improve our processes! As a Finance Manager responsible for month-end closing, I wanted to see what Claude Code could actually achieve—and it delivered! Even without Azure or backend access to our ERP system (D365 F&O), I didn't let that stop me from being "efficiently lazy." Claude Code showed me how to use the Playwright MCP to control Chrome and handle the heavy lifting for me. The script now automatically downloads the monthly trial balance, populates an Excel template, identifies discrepancies via color-coding, and even takes screenshots to document numbers from various reports. I’m already tackling my next big automation project—a task that is notoriously tedious when done manually. Stay tuned for that post, as well as more month-end automation updates in the near future! I had Claude code describe the workflow: Common Reconciliation — Monthly Close Automation with Claude Code + Playwright MCP Every month-end I run a single slash command (/mec-common) and pass it a month number. Claude then drives the entire reconciliation process end-to-end, touching both a live D365 ERP system and a multi-sheet Excel workbook — no manual steps. The workflow in three phases: Phase 1 — Trial Balance Claude navigates to the D365 Trial Balance page, clears any stale filters, sets the correct date range, triggers a recalculation, and downloads the export. The Excel file is placed in the right folder, and the data is pasted (values only) into the reconciliation workbook's Trial bal D365 sheet. A full workbook recalculation is then forced before anything is read. Phase 2 — Revaluation Check Claude loops through ~50 reconciliation sheets. On each sheet it finds the last row where column C says "Revaluation" (there are two — the second one holds the actual diff) and reads the value in column G. If the diff is outside ±1, the sheet tab is colored red. One sheet (150070) is always flagged red and requires manual review regardless.