How accountants actually use Claude.
Accountants use Claude to draft year-end letters, write review notes, answer client emails, summarize meetings and prep engagement letters. The biggest win is turning those jobs into skills, saved actions your team runs again in one click, so the work gets faster every week instead of starting from a blank box.
By Mike Libbey, CEO of YBL
Jobs Claude handles well in a firm
- Drafting year-end letters for a full client list.
- Writing review notes on files.
- Drafting replies to the client email backlog, with a human hitting send.
- Summarizing client meetings.
- Prepping engagement letters from your template.
- Sorting and naming client documents, and flagging what's missing.
What stays human
Partner sign-off on returns. Tough tax planning calls. Anything where a client is trusting your judgment. Let the machine handle the repetitive stuff. Keep the humans where it truly matters.
What's a Claude skill?
A skill is a saved action you run in one click. It holds your templates, your rules and your firm's way of doing a job. YBL has built 200+ of them for its own team.
How to start
Take one thing you already do by hand. Do it once with Claude. Then save it as a skill you can run again. That's exactly what we teach in the Claude 101 for Accountants workshops, and it's what we set up across your firm.
Common questions
Do accountants need to learn prompting?
A little helps, but skills do most of the work. Once a job is saved as a skill, your team runs it without writing a prompt from scratch.
Can Claude review a file for me?
Claude can draft review notes and flag issues, and a reviewer still signs off. It speeds the review up. It doesn't replace the reviewer.