Stop 3 of 9 · Weekly

The categorisation pass with Cowork

One delegation across twenty client files that proposes an account for every uncategorised row, and the review protocol that decides which proposals a bookkeeper actually reads.

What it is

Twenty files and somewhere north of four thousand transactions a month that nobody has looked at yet. Doing that as twenty conversations is Farida's whole week. Doing it as one delegation is a Wednesday morning.

Cowork takes a task rather than a message: you hand it the brief, it works through the client folders and the connectors, and it comes back with proposals. Nothing posts, nothing reclasses, no bank rule changes. That part does not move because the work got bigger.

The brief is per client, not per practice

The pass reads each client's own material, so each client folder holds four things: the chart of accounts export, the rule list, last month's closed P&L, and the standing questions with their answers. A pass run against a stale chart of accounts produces confident proposals against accounts that were renamed in July.

Three tiers, and only one of them is safe to sample

For each client folder under Practice Clients, take the uncategorised transactions from that client connected QuickBooks Online file. Using only that client chart of accounts export and rule list, propose an account for every transaction. Mark it high confidence when it matches a rule exactly, medium when it matches a categorised transaction from the last six months and name that transaction, otherwise unresolved. Never propose an account for an owner draw, a distribution, loan principal, an inter-account transfer or anything that looks personal: put those on the questions list with the question already written. Return one file per client with the proposals table, the questions list and the counts by tier. Post nothing, reclass nothing, change no bank rule, and stop and ask me before touching any file not in that folder.

The review, which is the part that cannot be delegated

Reading three thousand rows is not review, it is theatre. The protocol is fixed so that nobody has to decide what to skip while they are tired.

Take the CL-03 proposals and give me a review queue in this order: every unresolved row, every medium confidence row with its precedent transaction, every row over 500 dollars whatever its tier, then a random ten percent of the remaining high confidence rows. One line each with date, payee, amount, proposed account and the reason. Number the lines so I can reply with only the numbers I reject.

Here are the line numbers I rejected from CL-03 and what each should have been: [paste your rejections]. For each, write the rule that would have caught it, in the same format as the rest of the CL-03 rule list. Flag any new rule that contradicts an existing one and show both lines side by side. Do not edit the rule file, give me the lines to paste.

The number that tells you whether this works

Acceptance rate per tier per client: proposals accepted divided by proposals reviewed. High confidence should sit above ninety percent. Medium will sit lower and that is correct, because medium is a guess with a citation. When high confidence drops, the rule list has drifted, and the fix is in the client folder, not in the prompt.

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