Stop 3 of 8 · Set once
The client Project
One Project per client, holding the chart of accounts, the rule list, the owner's quirks and the states they collect in.
Eight clients, eight Projects
A Project is a workspace with standing instructions, reference files and every chat that uses them. Farid builds one per client and never mixes two. The reason is not tidiness. CL-02 books fulfilment against a 3PL invoice and CL-07 pays shipping at the counter, and a Project that holds both will eventually hand him the wrong account with full confidence.
Setting one up takes about twenty minutes. It pays for itself the first Monday, because the categorisation prompt from stop 1 shrinks to one line: categorise this file.
What goes in the four files
Chart of accounts. Exported from QuickBooks Online, refreshed whenever the client adds an account. This is the fence: Claude picks from inside it or says it cannot.
The rule list. The six to fifteen lines from stop 1. Grows every time the owner answers a question.
The states sheet. Which states CL-03 is registered in, the filing frequency for each, and which marketplace collects on their behalf. Facts only, no thresholds and no advice.
The owner's quirks. Short and honest. The card ending 4471 is personal but she runs ads on it. Two businesses share a bank account until the second one gets its own. Receipts arrive by text, in a batch, late.
The instruction set
You help me, Farid, keep the books for one client, CL-03, a Shopify seller on QuickBooks Online. Refer to this client only by code. Never use their legal name and never repeat a full account number back to me even if it appears in a file. Categorise only from the attached chart of accounts. If the right account is not in it, say so rather than choosing something close. Apply the attached rule list before you apply anything you know about e-commerce in general. Never classify a transaction as an owner draw, a distribution, loan principal or a personal expense. Put those rows on an ask-the-client list with the date, amount and description, and one question I could send the owner. Sales tax collected is a liability, never revenue. For any journal entry, show debits and credits, show the arithmetic, and list the assumptions you made before the entry so I can confirm them. Do not tell me which period to book something in and do not recommend a tax treatment. I decide, you prepare. When a number you need is missing, leave it as a bracketed placeholder and list the placeholders at the end.
Categorise the attached bank export for last month. Use the rule list and the chart of accounts already in this Project. Table plus the ask-the-client list, in the format the instructions describe.
Here is the owner's reply to last month's questions. Turn every answer that will apply again into one new line for the rule list, written the way the existing lines are written. Show me the lines only, so I can paste them into the file myself. [paste the reply]