How a financial controller in Germany automated a full day of monthly reconciliation work

Who this is about

Christian Loppinet is a Financial controller in Cooper Turner Beck group, currently completing the practical years required for chartered accountancy status. He's also writing his qualifying thesis on how chartered accountants can use Claude in the budgeting and variance analysis work they do for clients.

Before

Every month end, he reconciled two related entities by hand: clearing overdue accounts receivable, updating the intercompany AR from that balance, then completing the intercompany statements between entities so the numbers could be uploaded to the group's reporting platform. Three steps, done in Excel, from a fresh export each time. Before he could automate any of it, he had to make the case internally for a Claude license, since access at his company wasn't automatic.

What he built

He came into session 2 with the process already mapped and asked how to turn it into something repeatable. Following the same approach covered in that session, he built it as two skills inside a Cowork project: one that adds reconciliation formulas to the raw AR export, and one that uses that output to populate the reconciliation template. He tested the first two steps against May and June data and confirmed the output matched what he'd have gotten doing it by hand. By session 3 he was scoping the third step, accounts payable and the reconciling items that come with it.

He didn't get it right in one pass. Running it month to month, he caught a mistake in the output, had Claude correct it, and asked Claude to hold that fix in memory so the same error wouldn't show up the next month.

Result

Roughly a day saved each month on this one task. It was one of several use cases he worked through in the training, and the one that paid off fastest. By the final session, he was also weighing whether to extend it into a plugin.