Claude creates my invoices, sends them, and verifies payment
Peter Hartree
As a freelancer, every month I have to:
- Review the work I did
- Create and send invoices
- Check the previous month's invoices were paid
There's quite some complexity in this process. Different clients have different hourly rates. I invoice coaching clients per session, not by the hour. Projects have fixed quotes sometimes. And so on.
Claude now handles >90% of the work. What was a 1-hour task now takes 5 minutes.

Claude created this invoice in Xero, downloaded timesheets from Toggle, and sent the email. The only thing I did was check the data before sending.
What the skill does
The parts in red require manual action from me. The rest are handled by Claude:
- Create a monthly admin task list in Obsidian.
- Download time reports from Toggl, extract the billable hours for each client, save PDFs for my records.
- Ask me to check before proceeding.
- Create invoices:
- For hourly clients, draft invoices based on Toggl data.
- For coaching clients, get session counts from Google Calendar.
- Ask me to check before proceeding.1
- Create invoices in Xero.
- Email invoices to my clients.
- Remind me to manually submit invoices for one client via Deel.
- Confirm that last month's invoices were paid:
- Search Gmail for payment notifications and cross-check with Xero.
- Ask me to check before proceeding.
- Mark invoices as paid in Xero.

How I made this
In short:
Hey Claude, I'm a freelancer and I have to send invoices every month and also verify that my past month's invoices were paid. Could you help me make a skill to do this?
I use Claude Code, which might look a little scary. But it's just like the chat app you're used to, with extra powers.2 Everyone should use it.
Creating the skill took 1-2 hours. It was all done in conversation with Claude—I didn't write any code. At times my software engineering background was helpful, but this could be done without that—it just might take a little longer.

Footnotes
If corrections are needed, I just explain them verbally—just as I would to a human assistant. I don't have to suddenly start coding to handle an edge case. ↩
The Claude web app has a restrictive security sandbox. So, if there's no connector, you can't interact with apps like Xero or Toggl. It also can't automatically download and manipulate files on your computer. Finally: creating Claude skills is faster with Claude Code. ↩
