Month-End Close in Claude and Self-Hosted AI
A few weeks ago, I wrapped up my first full month end close driven entirely by Claude. I’ve been testing the various components over the last few months, but finishing this cycle was a big milestone.
Claude handled the reconciliations, workpaper creation, posted Prepaid JEs, and generated financial statements & SaaS metrics for me. Every piece ran off a specific set of Claude skills and output templates I built out.
There were some issues of course. Claude had some issues with file formatting, a few skills needed updating to be more specific, and I definitely found areas for improvement in the outputs. The flux analysis did not meet my expectations. Claude only operated at the account level without really digging into the full details. I’ve tuned the skill so it will now pull data from multiple MCPs, run queries and look for seasonality and run-rate trend changes at the customer and vendor level. I will test this with April close. Of course, Anthropic will ship 100 updates in the next few days and might break everything though.
The next major addition to the plugin will be a new financial reporting package skill. Honestly, who is tired of QBO reporting? They are changing their layout again anyway, so I am weighing whether to move toward HTML or PPT outputs. I lean toward something a bit more visual. Claude’s PPT skills are actually really good right now, making it easy to generate on-brand decks directly from Excel data.
On the personal side, I am testing some fully local AI setups. I installed Qwen 3.6 locally with Ollama and tested it alongside Claude CLI, Claude in VSCode, and Cline in VSCode. Claude does not like operating without an Anthropic model behind the scenes. Cline gave me great control over context usage and actually built out most of an app for me, but it ultimately proved slower than Claude Code and less accurate at resolving final bugs. I had to bring Claude in for those final edits, which was fast. I am going to try Qwen CLI next since it already feels quite a bit faster, but once you get used to the speed and simplicity of Claude Code / CoWork, sticking with other setups is tough.
In the end, within a few days that setup let me build a running app for my daughter. It takes .FIT files recorded on her watch, ingests them automatically, and generates summary charts so we can track her training runs, races, and overall progress over time (watch out Strava!).