A month of bookkeeping with an AI assistant: a contractor's four weeks, task by task

The pages about accounting with an AI assistant explain the mechanism: an assistant such as Claude connects to KRONENWERK through an MCP server, the company picks one of three levels, and the assistant can read, draft or — within a limit — act. This page shows what that is like across an ordinary month, for an ordinary business: a two-person electrical contractor in Montréal, on the Enterprise plan, level set to propose for the first three weeks and act within a limit for the fourth. Every exchange below is the kind the tools support today; nothing is imagined that the assistant cannot do, and the moments where it stops and hands back to a person are shown as they happen.

Week one: the receipts drawer

Monday evening, the owner photographs eleven receipts from the week — supply-house counters, a parking stub, a hardware store — and forwards three supplier invoices from her inbox. They land in KRONENWERK's queue with the figures read as printed. Then she opens Claude and says: "Record the eleven receipts you find in the inbox; the ones from Lumen go on the Dubois job, the parking on the Tremblay job, the rest on overhead." The assistant reads the queue, matches supplier names to the two open transactions, records each receipt as a bill with the amounts and tax as printed, files the photo with it, and links it to the job she named. It reports back with a list: eleven bills recorded, two with a note that the tax line on the receipt did not add up to the total and were recorded as printed for her to look at.

What the assistant did not do: approve anything. At the propose level a recorded bill is awaiting confirmation; it is not due to anyone and it is not in the payables until she confirms it. She opens the queue on Tuesday morning, glances at the two flagged ones, confirms all eleven in four minutes. That is the shape of the whole month: the assistant does the typing, the person does the signing.

Week two: quotes and a customer who wants it in writing

A property manager asks for a quote on a panel upgrade. The owner dictates the scope in a message: "Draft a quote for Gestion Lafleur, panel upgrade at 4410 rue Saint-Denis: 200 A panel, 14 hours labour at our standard rate, materials 1,850 before tax, GST and QST, valid thirty days, in French." The assistant creates a quote draft with the lines, the two taxes as separate lines, the customer's language, the validity, and returns the draft's link. She reads it, changes the hours to 16, and sends it herself from KRONENWERK, because sending a document to a customer is a person's act at this level.

Two days later: "Which quotes are open and older than two weeks?" Three, with customer names, amounts and dates. "Draft a short follow-up note for each and put it on the job." Notes on three transactions, to be pasted into e-mails she writes. The assistant can read everything she can read and write notes and drafts; it does not send e-mail on her behalf.

Week three: month-end questions

The accountant wants a look before the quarterly GST/QST filing. Before the call the owner asks: "Who owes us money, aged by how late?" A list: two invoices under thirty days, one at forty-six days, one at ninety-one. "What did we bill in August, and what did we spend, by category?" The profit and loss for the month, read from the ledger. "Show me the attention list." The items KRONENWERK itself flags: a bill with a due date tomorrow, a receipt in the queue since last week, a customer whose QST number is missing. "Is there anything on the Dubois job that has no document attached?" One payment, recorded from the bank import, with no remittance filed.

The accountant, invited into the company with her own login, sees the same books; she does not need the assistant, and the assistant cannot see anything she has not been given rights to see. What the assistant will not do at this or any level: post a journal entry, enter an opening balance, close the period, cancel an issued invoice or change a customer's master data. When the owner, in a hurry, says "cancel invoice 2026-0187, the customer disputes it", the reply is a sentence: this is an act reserved for a person; a credit note can be drafted for you to issue. She issues the credit note herself from the invoice's page.

Week four: the limit

After three weeks she raises the level to act within a limit and sets the limit at CA$2,000 gross. This adds three acts to the assistant's side of the table: issue an invoice, send it, record a customer's payment. Monday: "Issue and send the invoice for the Tremblay job as drafted, 1,640 plus taxes." The total with GST and QST is CA$1,885.59, under the limit; the invoice gets its number, is issued, and is sent to the customer's address on record, and the assistant reports the number. Wednesday: "Issue the invoice for Gestion Lafleur." The panel upgrade totals CA$6,700 with tax; the assistant does not issue it. The act is rolled back whole — no number spent, no record, no e-mail — and the reply states the rule, says nothing was done, and names the setting a person would change. She issues that one herself, as she would have anyway.

Friday: the bank import shows four customer payments. "Record the payments that match open invoices exactly." Three do, each under the limit, and are recorded against their invoices; the fourth, a partial payment, is listed for her to record by hand with the shortfall noted. The month closes with every receipt recorded, every bill confirmed by a person, every invoice issued either by her or under the limit she set, and a record of every act with who did it — her or the assistant — and when.

What a month like this changes

The contractor in this illustration is composed, not quoted, so no hours saved are claimed here; measure your own first month. What the illustration does show is where the time moves: from typing figures into reading and confirming them. Nothing is booked that the person does not see, and receipts whose tax line does not add up are recorded as printed and flagged, rather than silently "fixed". The Enterprise plan carries the assistant connection and the API; the level and the limit are two settings under Settings → AI agent (MCP), changed in a minute and applying to every assistant and every key alike.

How KRONENWERK handles this

SUPPORTED An MCP server with twenty-two tools — twelve that read, seven that draft, three that act — behind one company-wide level and a gross limit per act; recorded bills awaiting confirmation; drafts without numbers; acts rolled back whole when they exceed the limit; the reserved acts — cancel, approve or pay a supplier, journal entries, periods, settings — kept for a signed-in person; every act on the record with actor and time. Connect in five minutes: connect Claude; the full boundary table and thirty prompts: what an assistant can and cannot do.