Finance & bookkeeping · Claude Code

Turn vendor PDFs into categorised QuickBooks records without retyping

Idea + starter prompt, not run by us yet

For: Businesses that key vendor PDF invoices into QuickBooks by hand

Eamonn Cottrell had a Claude Code integration that reads vendor PDFs, sorts the items and makes invoices in QuickBooks Online. He then had it remove the last manual steps: attach the PDF, check with him when an item is new and add it to the master list, clean up files and check for duplicates. A test run handled 40 PDFs.

Steps

1. Start with a QuickBooks sandbox or a few test documents.
2. Paste the starter prompt and ask for a plan before any record is created.
3. Have it ask you about unknown items instead of guessing.
4. Test duplicate protection by running the same batch twice.
5. Check a few created records in QuickBooks against the PDFs.

Starter prompt

Help me build a tool that reads vendor PDFs from [folder] and creates records in [QuickBooks sandbox].

For each PDF: pull vendor, date, items and amounts. Match each item to a category in [category list]. If an item is unknown, ask me and add my answer to the list. Attach the PDF to the record. Skip any PDF already entered.

Show me the plan first. Run on [3] test PDFs and show me the records before running the rest. Keep API keys in a local env file. Never print them.

Original post: gotsheet.xyz · found via agentusecases.ai. Written up in our own words. We haven't run it, so test it on made-up data first.