QBO <> Claude Code

I’ve been slowly automating one of our recurring QuickBooks workflows for months.

The system was already doing most of the heavy lifting. Vendor PDFs come in, my custom integration extracts the data, categorizes the items, and creates the appropriate invoices in QuickBooks Online.

I originally built the whole thing with Claude Code despite having never built a QuickBooks integration before.

But there were still a few manual steps bothering me.

So I opened the existing project in Claude Code and started removing them.

1. Automatically attach the original invoice

The integration created the QuickBooks invoice but didn’t attach the original PDF.

Claude Code added support for the QuickBooks attachment API while leaving the existing invoice-creation logic alone.

Now it matches each PDF to the correct invoice and attaches it automatically.

2. Make the item list update itself

When the system encountered a product it hadn't seen before, it used to stop and make me manually update a CSV.

Now it simply asks me which category the new item belongs to.

Once I answer, it updates the master item list itself so it knows how to handle that product next time.

3. Automatically clean up the files

Once a PDF has been successfully attached, the workflow safely deletes the local copy.

I also had it remove the temporary CSV when processing is complete.

4. Add duplicate protection

I wanted protection against accidentally processing the same batch twice.

Claude Code added a safeguard that checks existing invoices and skips duplicates.

I tested it by deliberately running the process twice.

It worked.

The result

I then applied the same improvements to another vendor workflow.

On the test run, the system found 40 PDFs, created the necessary QuickBooks records, attached the PDFs, and cleaned everything up automatically.

This workflow used to take hours.

Over time, I got it down to minutes.

Now I’m shaving away those last few minutes too.

That’s one of the things I find most compelling about AI-assisted coding: you don’t necessarily need to build some giant new software product.

Sometimes the best opportunity is simply finding a repetitive process inside your existing business and asking:

Why am I still doing this manually?

Hope this sparks something useful for you. Subscribe to the YouTube channel if you haven’t already, and hope you have a great one!

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Cheers, Eamonn

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