For owners of bookkeeping and small accounting firms
It’s the 12th. Forty transactions are still uncategorized, and the client won’t answer.
Bank feeds to clear for twenty clients, the same questions emailed three times, a catch-up job that was supposed to take a week and is eating the month, and 1099 season on the way with half the W-9s missing. On a flat monthly fee every extra hour comes out of your margin, and the reports still have to go out on time.
The Small Firm AI Kit for Bookkeepers: one Claude Skill with 16 ready-made playbooks.
- Month-end commentary
- Batched client question emails
- 1099 readiness reports
- One-time payment
- 30-day money-back guarantee
- Works on free Claude
Email to Client A: 5 quick questions to close October (excerpt)
Hi Client A, October is almost closed and 41 transactions need a word from you. I’ve grouped them into five questions; most take one word to answer.
1. Hardware Store 1, 14 charges, $3,184.27: all job materials, as in September? 2. Four Zelle payments of $1,200.00 to Vendor 1: is Vendor 1 a subcontractor? If so, they are past the $2,000 1099 threshold and I’ll send them a W-9 request before January.
Checked before you see it
- Checked: All 41 transactions accounted for, totals computed with code
- Checked: Grouped by payee and pattern: 5 questions instead of 41
- Flagged: Vendor 1 passes the 1099 threshold in your Firm Profile ($2,000 for 2026): added to the W-9 list
Not a bookkeeper? There’s a kit for your practice:
Compare allIf this sounds like your month, keep reading
- Client A’s bank feed shows 41 uncategorized transactions, and the email you sent on the 3rd is still unanswered.
- The P&L goes out with no notes, and two days later the owner calls to ask why profit fell when sales were up.
- A new client is fourteen months behind, wants a price today, and you are guessing the hours from one bank statement.
- It’s late January, one contractor’s W-9 is still missing, and the 1099-NEC is due on the 31st.
Where the hours go
Roughly 11 hours a week go to the same five jobs
The same week with Claude and these playbooks: about 6 hours back
- Today
- With The Small Firm AI Kit for Bookkeepers
Chasing clients about uncategorized transactions
Today: 3 h/wkWith The Small Firm AI Kit for Bookkeepers: 1.5 h/wkMonth-end notes that explain the numbers
Today: 3 h/wkWith The Small Firm AI Kit for Bookkeepers: 1.5 h/wkClient emails, notices and fee conversations
Today: 2.5 h/wkWith The Small Firm AI Kit for Bookkeepers: 1.25 h/wkScoping and pricing catch-up work (Pro)
Today: 2 h/wkWith The Small Firm AI Kit for Bookkeepers: 1 h/wk1099 season and the year-end handoff
Today: 1 h/wkWith The Small Firm AI Kit for Bookkeepers: 0.5 h/wk
Today: ≈11.5 h a week, ≈552 h a year on this work.
Back in your week with Pro, our estimate
≈5.75 h
With Basic: ≈4.75 h
Example starting value: $85. Move it to your own number.
- Pro pays for itself after
- ≈70 min
- Time back, each month
- ≈$1,955
How we estimated these numbers
Most monthly clients pay a flat fee: in Ignition’s 2025 US pricing benchmark of 219 firms, the most common monthly bookkeeping fee was $250–$499 (29% of firms). So every extra email and every slow reply comes out of your margin. This is a conservative picture for a small firm with about 20 monthly clients, a couple of catch-up prospects a month and contractors to report in January. More clients, more of everything.
- Chasing clients about uncategorized transactions, 3 h/week: Our estimate: about 36 minutes per monthly client to write, send and re-send questions about uncategorized transactions and missing receipts, 20 monthly clients. No published figure found.
- Month-end notes that explain the numbers, 3 h/week: Our estimate: about 36 minutes per client to review the month and write the notes that go with the financials, 20 monthly clients. No published figure found.
- Client emails, notices and fee conversations, 2.5 h/week: Our estimate: about 30 minutes a working day on client questions, sales tax notices, scope creep and fee emails. No published figure found.
- Scoping and pricing catch-up work, 2 h/week: Our estimate: about 4 hours per catch-up prospect to review the statements, scope the work and write the proposal, two prospects a month. No published figure found.
- 1099 season and the year-end handoff, 1 h/week: Our estimate: about 2.4 hours per client to review vendors, chase W-9s and write the 1099 memo and CPA package, 20 clients, spread over 48 working weeks. No published figure found.
These are our estimates, not measured results. No published study times these bookkeeping tasks, so we started from the conservative hours above and assumed every task still needs you: checking each suggested category, posting every change in the books yourself, reviewing each email before it goes out and clearing every [VERIFY]. So we cut each task by half at most. For comparison, Karbon’s State of AI in Accounting 2026 report puts the average time saved at 60 minutes a day per employee at firms using AI.
Week: A standard 40-hour week (our basis); we found no published time study of small bookkeeping firms. In Intuit’s 2026 Firm of the Future survey of 725 US accounting and bookkeeping professionals, 90% called burnout a significant issue.. Yearly figures use 48 working weeks, monthly ones 4.
One Skill · 16 playbooks inside
Describe the client. Get the actual draft.
One Skill in Claude: you say what you need in plain words, its router opens the right playbook, and back comes a draft with every figure tied to its report. These are excerpts of what comes back, built on fictional, anonymized facts. The books themselves stay in QuickBooks or Xero, and every entry is still yours.
The questions out in one email, the numbers explained in words the owner reads.
You ask
“Client B’s October financials are closed. Write the notes that go with the report: what changed, why, and what they should do. The owner reads on his phone.”
You get
What changed, why and what to do, every figure tied to its report and line.
Playbook: month-end-commentary.md · in every plan
bookkeepers/
├─ SKILL.md
the router: reads your request, opens the right playbook
├─ your profile, saved at setup
└─ playbooks/
├─ confidentiality-preflight.md
├─ tie-out-guard.md
├─ client-update-writer.md
└─ … 13 more
See all 16 playbooks
In every planBasic · $49
- Client data anonymized before any work starts
confidentiality-preflight.md - Every figure traced to its report before a client sees it
tie-out-guard.md - Client emails that get answered
client-update-writer.md - A fee-increase letter that keeps the client
fee-and-scope-letters.md - Month-end commentary your clients actually read
month-end-commentary.md - Forty uncategorized transactions, one email, two minutes
transaction-question-batcher.md - A 1099 readiness report and the W-9 requests, drafted
1099-season-kit.md
Added in ProPro · $99
- A catch-up proposal with scope, timeline and fixed prices
catch-up-proposal.md - A health check of a new client’s books, before you quote
books-health-check.md - A reply to a state sales tax notice, drafted from the file
sales-tax-notice-reply.md - Missing statements and receipts chased, client by client
missing-documents-chaser.md - An SOP for every recurring client task
sop-writer.md - A quarterly filing calendar email for every client
filing-calendar-letter.md - A one-page brief for the quarterly client call
quarterly-review-brief.md - A year-end package the CPA doesn’t send back
year-end-cpa-handoff.md - An AI paragraph for your engagement letter, ready in minutes
engagement-letter-ai-clause.md
Why not just ChatGPT?
Why not just paste the bank feed into ChatGPT?
Most firms already use AI somewhere: in Intuit’s 2026 Firm of the Future survey, 88% of US accounting and bookkeeping pros had used it for at least one client service. But Karbon’s 2026 report found only 21% of firms have an AI policy, and in Intuit’s survey 60% say clients ask for proof of AI data protection always or frequently. A plain chatbot is fast, but it doesn’t know your clients, their chart of accounts or where its numbers came from.
Generic AI
- It answers from memory. Plenty of 1099 templates still say $600; for tax years beginning after 2025 the 1099-NEC and 1099-MISC threshold is $2,000 (IRS Instructions for Forms 1099-MISC and 1099-NEC, Rev. Dec 2026). In this kit, thresholds and due dates come only from your Firm Profile, marked [VERIFY].
- It guesses instead of asking. A widely shared r/tax post warns that ChatGPT “will often make incorrect assumptions” rather than ask clarifying questions. A guessed category is a wrong entry in the books; this kit turns every unclear item into a question for the client.
- It does sums in its head, so a total can come back that doesn’t tie to the export. Here every total, variance and 1099 amount is computed with code, inputs shown, and every figure points to its report and line.
- It has no procedure. Each chat starts from zero: no client history, no house style, no verification block, and nothing your staff can repeat the same way next month.
The Small Firm AI Kit for Bookkeepers
Why this works where a plain chatbot didn’t
- 1
Works from exports, never inside your books
Claude never gets a login to QuickBooks, Xero or a bank. You export the P&L, the transaction list or the vendor report as CSV or PDF, Confidentiality Pre-Flight swaps names for Client A and Vendor 1 and masks account numbers and EINs, and nothing is posted back. Every change in the ledger is yours.
- 2
Every figure tied out, every total computed with code
Tie-Out Guard traces each number in a commentary, email or proposal back to the report and line it came from and totals it with code, inputs shown. A figure it can’t trace is marked [NO SOURCE] instead of being rounded into the story.
- 3
No thresholds or due dates from memory, and your review last
1099 thresholds, filing dates and sales tax rules come only from your Firm Profile, each marked [VERIFY]. Every output ends with a verification block: what was checked, what needs you, and a line for your sign-off before anything reaches a client.
How it works
Set up once. Then just ask.
No coding, no prompts to copy. You install it the way you would add a document to Claude.
- 1
Download the ZIP
Right after checkout you get one ZIP, ready to download on the page: a single Claude Skill for your firm with every playbook in your plan inside. No account, no login, no subscription.
- 2
Upload it to Claude
Add it once in Claude’s settings. After that you just ask for the work: the Skill reads your request and opens the right playbook, so you never pick a file yourself. It runs on every Claude plan, including Free with code execution turned on. For real client files, use Team or Enterprise, which don’t train on your data by default, or turn training off in the privacy settings of Free, Pro or Max.
- 3
Answer the 5-minute Firm Profile interview
Your software, the kinds of clients you serve, your close calendar, fee schedule, house style and signature, and the 1099 thresholds and due dates you work to, entered once from the IRS instructions and your states’ rules and never guessed. Saved once and read by every playbook.
Compare your options
What the other options cost
These are the real alternatives a small bookkeeping firm has today, at the prices published or reported for them. None of them is wrong, and the kit doesn’t replace your ledger or your practice management. They are priced for a different job, or per client, every month.
- AI categorization inside the ledger (Booke.ai)$129 per business a month (published price); firm pricing on requestWorks inside QuickBooks Online or Xero and is priced per client, every month: twenty monthly clients at that rate is $2,580 a month.
- An AI-native ledger (Digits)$65, $100 or $250 a month (Essentials, Core, Pro; published prices)An AI-native general ledger for a small business, with roles for its accountant. Using it means moving the client’s books to a new ledger, not working next to the QuickBooks or Xero files you keep today.
- AI bookkeeping platform (Docyt)From $0 to $299 and up per entity a month, by tier (as listed on Booke.ai’s comparison page)Now positioned as an AI-native ERP for hotels, restaurants, retail and franchises, and priced per entity.
- Practice management with AI features (Karbon, Canopy)Karbon $708–$1,068 per user a year (third-party report); Canopy $74–$149 per user a month, billed annuallyBuilt to run your workflow, reminders and client portal, and good at it, so keep yours. Billed per seat, every year.
- Prompt packs$37 for 20 prompts and 5 workflows (Payhip) up to $149 (Gumroad); free lists of 100+ promptsPrompts, not procedures: no Firm Profile, no tie-out, no verification block, and every month starts from a blank chat.
- Part-time helpAbout $24.36 an hour: the BLS median for bookkeeping clerks, May 2025, before payroll taxesSomeone still has to train and review them, and hiring is hard: in a 2026 GATI/Advancetrack survey of 500 accountants, 73% of firms turn away work for lack of staff.
- The Small Firm AI Kit for Bookkeepers$49 or $99, once$49 or $99, paid once. Even Pro costs less than one month of an AI categorization tool on a single client’s books at its published price, and it never renews.
Pick your plan
One payment. Yours to keep.
Less than one month of an AI categorization tool on a single client’s books, with no renewal after it. One payment, yours to keep.
Pro costs, once
$99
Basic: $49 once
It pays for itself after
≈70 min
of time won back, at $85 for a bookkeeping hour
Get back just 1 hour a month
$85
a month, against a one-time $99. Our estimate is ≈5.75 h a week.
Break-even = plan price ÷ the hourly value set in “Where the hours go” above.
Basic
The core kit plus the three month-in, month-out essentials.
$49one-time
7 ready-made playbooks
Try it on real work. Not for you? Full refund within 30 days.
- 4 core playbooks: Confidentiality Pre-Flight, Tie-Out Guard, Client Update Writer, Fee & Scope Letters
- Month-End Commentary your clients actually read
- Transaction Question Batcher: one email per client instead of forty questions
- 1099 Season Kit: readiness report and W-9 request sequence
- Firm Profile interview: set your software, clients, fee schedule and house style once
- Verification block at the end of every output
Pro
The whole firm, from the first catch-up quote to the year-end handoff.
$99one-time
All 16 playbooks
Only $50 more than Basic: +9 playbooks and the Pro bonuses below.
Try it on real work. Not for you? Full refund within 30 days.
- Everything in Basic
- Catch-Up Proposal Builder with fixed-price options
- Books Health Check for new and cleanup clients
- Sales Tax Notice Reply
- Missing Documents Chaser
- SOP Writer for your close, onboarding and AP/AR
- Filing Calendar Letter for payroll and sales tax
- Quarterly Review Brief
- Year-End CPA Handoff
- Engagement Letter + AI Clause, with a §7216 reminder for firms that prepare returns
- Excel and Word templates for your month-end report, catch-up proposal and 1099 readiness report
- Firm Style Guide: your house style, applied by every playbook
- Sample outputs from every playbook, to compare against your own
- 12 months of fixes and adjustments to the included playbooks
30-day money-back guarantee
Run the kit on a real, anonymized client month. If it doesn’t earn its place in your firm within 30 days, email us and we refund every cent. No conditions.
- One-time payment, no subscription
- Works on free Claude
Run a different kind of practice? Tax resolutionCPA firmsTax preparersTell us yours →
No Claude account yet?
No Claude yet? You’re 2 minutes away
Claude is Anthropic’s AI assistant. Its free plan runs The Small Firm AI Kit for Bookkeepers: you create the account, switch on one setting and upload the kit, in about two minutes and without a credit card.
- The free plan works: no subscription and no credit card to start
- About two minutes from sign-up to your first request
- Paid plans only add more usage, for when you want it
Client confidentiality comes first. Every task starts with Confidentiality Pre-Flight, which offers anonymized mode and swaps names for placeholders like Client A and Vendor 1. Try the kit free on anonymized facts, then run real files on a Claude business plan, which doesn’t train on your data.
- 1
Create a free account
Go to claude.ai and sign up with your email, Google or Apple account. It’s free and ready right away.
- 2
Turn on one setting
In Settings → Capabilities, switch on “Code execution and file creation”. Skills need it, and it’s free.
- 3
Upload your package
In Customize → Skills, click “+”, choose “Upload a skill” and select the ZIP you received. Then just ask.
Fair questions
What bookkeepers ask before buying
Is it safe to put client books into Claude?
You don’t put the books in. You export only the reports a task needs, as CSV or PDF, and Confidentiality Pre-Flight swaps names for Client A and Vendor 1 and masks account numbers and EINs before any work starts. Claude never gets a login to QuickBooks, Xero or a bank. On Claude’s Free, Pro and Max plans you can turn off the use of your chats for training in the privacy settings; Team and Enterprise don’t train on your data by default. For client work, use one of those settings and anonymize anyway.
What about the FTC Safeguards Rule and my security plan?
If your firm prepares returns, the Rule (16 CFR 314) treats it as a financial institution that must keep a written information security plan; IRS Pub 5708 says tax and accounting professionals are, regardless of size. Firms with customer information on fewer than 5,000 consumers are spared some elements, such as the written risk assessment and the incident response plan, but not the plan itself. Adding an AI tool means adding it to that plan: which tool, which plan tier, what data never goes in, who reviews. The kit works on anonymized exports so the data question stays small, and the AI Compliance Kit add-on includes an AI addendum for your plan. If you only keep books, ask your advisor whether the Rule covers you; a written plan is good practice either way.
Will it make up numbers or 1099 rules?
Every figure is traced to the report and line it came from and totalled with code, inputs shown; anything it can’t trace is marked [NO SOURCE]. Thresholds and due dates come only from your Firm Profile, each marked [VERIFY]. We don’t promise zero errors. We promise every number and every date is flagged for you to check.
I already use QuickBooks or Xero. Why would I need this?
Keep them. The ledger is where categories get posted and accounts get reconciled. The kit works on everything around the ledger: the questions to clients, the notes that explain the numbers, the proposal for a cleanup, the W-9 requests, the notice reply and the fee letter. It reads the reports you export and never changes the books.
Do I have to tell clients I use AI?
The IRS hasn’t said whether return preparers must, and CNBC reported in August 2026 that practitioners are still debating it. Clients are asking anyway: in Intuit’s 2026 Firm of the Future survey, 60% of accounting and bookkeeping pros said clients ask for proof of AI data protection always or frequently. The Pro plan drafts a plain-English AI paragraph for your engagement letter, and if you also prepare returns, the AICPA advises a signed §7216 consent before return information goes into an AI tool.
Built for your rules
Built for your ledger and your clients
Pick your software and each client’s type in the Firm Profile, and the playbooks switch report names, vocabulary and the questions they ask. Using something else? Any CSV, Excel or PDF export works.
Your setup
QuickBooks Online
Reads the QuickBooks reports you already run and speaks its account names.
- Works from Profit and Loss, Balance Sheet, Transaction Detail by Account and the bank-feed “For review” export
- Books Health Check looks first at Uncategorized Income and Expense, Opening Balance Equity and Payments to deposit (Undeposited Funds)
- Question emails name the categories from the client’s own chart of accounts
Guardrails
Verification isn’t a disclaimer. It’s the product.
Every output ends with the same verification block: the key figures, the report and line behind each, the items marked [VERIFY], the checks this document needs from you and a line for your sign-off. We never promise zero errors. We promise every number and every date is flagged for you to check.
Sample verification block
From: Email to Client A: 5 quick questions to close October (excerpt)
- Checked: All 41 transactions accounted for, totals computed with code
- Checked: Grouped by payee and pattern: 5 questions instead of 41
- Flagged: Vendor 1 passes the 1099 threshold in your Firm Profile ($2,000 for 2026): added to the W-9 list
- Verify: Suggested categories come from the client’s own history, for you to accept or change
- 01
Works from exports, not your books
Claude never logs into QuickBooks, Xero, a payroll system or a bank. You upload the reports you choose, as CSV, Excel or PDF, and every change in the ledger is made by you.
- 02
A source on every figure
Every number in a commentary, email or proposal carries its report and line. Anything without one is marked [NO SOURCE], never rounded into the story.
- 03
Numbers computed with code
Totals, variances, 1099 amounts and fixed-fee options run as code with the inputs shown. No tax is computed and no category is posted.
- 04
No thresholds or due dates from memory
1099 thresholds, filing deadlines and sales tax rules come only from your Firm Profile, each marked [VERIFY]. It starts with the figures in the current IRS instructions ($2,000 for 1099-NEC and 1099-MISC; 1099-NEC due January 31) for you to confirm each year.
- 05
Anonymize first
Before any task, anonymized mode is offered: names become Client A and Vendor 1, account numbers and EINs are masked, and SSNs and full TINs are never needed. W-9s come in through your secure link, never pasted into Claude.
- 06
Fits your written security plan
If your firm prepares returns, the FTC Safeguards Rule (16 CFR 314) treats it as a financial institution that must keep a written information security plan, and IRS Pub 5708 says tax and accounting professionals are, regardless of size. The kit works the way such a plan expects: approved tool, anonymized data, human review. If you only keep books, ask your advisor whether the Rule covers you.
- 07
§7216, only where it applies
If you also prepare returns, tax return information falls under IRC §7216. The IRS hasn’t said how it applies to AI tools, and the AICPA advises a signed client consent first. The kit keeps return information apart from ordinary bookkeeping data and reminds you before it is used.
- 08
Nothing reaches a client without you
Client emails, commentary and letters carry a “Review before sending” banner. The kit never sends an email, posts an entry or files anything.
FAQ
Everything else
Didn’t find your answer? Email us:hello@summonskills.com
What exactly is in the ZIP?
One Claude Skill for your firm. Inside: a router file (SKILL.md) that reads each request and opens the right playbook, one Markdown playbook per job (7 in Basic, 16 in Pro), each with its instructions, templates and verification block, and the Firm Profile interview every playbook reads. Pro also includes the Firm Style Guide inside the Skill, plus a bonus pack: Excel and Word templates for the month-end report, the catch-up proposal and the 1099 readiness report, and sample outputs from every playbook. 12 months of fixes and adjustments to the included playbooks are included (new playbooks for future rule changes are not part of that).
Does it work on Claude’s Free plan?
Yes. The Skill runs on every Claude plan, including Free, as long as code execution is turned on. Free is fine for trying the kit with anonymized or fictional data. For real client files, Team or Enterprise is the cleaner choice because they don’t train on your data by default; on Free, Pro or Max, turn off the training setting in your privacy settings, and anonymize either way.
Does it connect to QuickBooks or Xero?
No, by design. Export the reports a task needs (P&L, balance sheet, transaction detail, vendor list, bank-feed items) as CSV, Excel or PDF and upload them to Claude. Claude never gets access to the books, and nothing is posted back: every change in the ledger is yours.
I use ChatGPT. Will this work there?
No. The kit is built as a Claude Skill, and ChatGPT has no equivalent way to install it once and have it open the right playbook for each request. Claude’s free plan is enough to try it, an account takes a minute, and you can keep ChatGPT for everything else.
Which software and clients does it cover?
QuickBooks Online and Xero by name, and any other system that exports CSV, Excel or PDF. It comes with notes for service businesses, e-commerce sellers and construction and trades clients, and you set each client’s type in the Firm Profile. Thresholds, due dates and state sales tax rules always come from what you enter, marked [VERIFY].
Does it prepare 1099s or tax returns?
No. The 1099 Season Kit tells you who needs which form, which W-9s are missing and drafts the requests; you file the forms in the system you already use. It doesn’t prepare returns or give tax advice, and the year-end package leaves tax decisions to the CPA.
Doesn’t Anthropic already do this?
Anthropic has reportedly published finance plugin templates, including one for month-end close (May 2026). They are general starting points, not built around a bookkeeping firm’s client work. This kit is: the batched question email, commentary in your client’s words, the catch-up proposal from your fee schedule, the W-9 sequence and the fee letter, each with your Firm Profile and a verification block. We are independent and not affiliated with Anthropic.
What if it isn’t right for my firm?
Email us within 30 days and we refund the full price. No conditions.
Is this tax or accounting advice?
No. The kit is for bookkeepers, accountants and their staff. It drafts and organizes; you review, decide and send. You remain responsible for the books, every filing and every email that leaves your firm.
Your next month-end, question email and 1099 season, every figure tied out before it leaves the firm.
Exports in; questions grouped, commentary drafted, every number traced to its report and totalled with code, thresholds only from your own profile, and your review last. About 6 hours a week back, by our estimate. $49 or $99, paid once. Use it on a real, anonymized client month, and if it doesn’t earn its place within 30 days, we refund every cent. Not tax advice; for bookkeeping and accounting firms.
One payment, yours to keep · 30-day money-back guarantee