Claude creates my invoices, sends them, and verifies payment

As a freelancer, every month I must:

1. Review the work I completed
2. Create and send invoices
3. Check that 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. Sometimes projects have fixed quotes. And so on.

Claude now handles >90% of the work. What was a 1-hour task now takes 5 minutes.

What the skill does

The parts in red require manual action from me. The rest are automated:

1. Create a monthly admin task list in Obsidian.
2. Download time reports from Toggl, extract the billable hours for each client, save PDFs for my records.
   1. Ask me to check before proceeding.
3. Create invoices:
   1. For hourly clients, draft invoices based on Toggl data.
   2. For coaching clients, ask me for session counts.
   3. Ask me to check before proceeding. ¹
   4. Create invoices in Xero.
4. Email invoices to my clients.
   1. Remind me to manually submit a timesheet for one client via Deel.
5. Verify last month's invoices were paid
   1. Search Gmail for payment notifications and cross-check with Xero.
   2. Ask me to check before proceeding.
   3. Mark invoices as paid in Xero.

How I made this

In short:

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'd just take a little longer.