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Claude creates my invoices, sends them, and verifies payment

As a freelancer, every month I have to:

  1. Review the work I did
  2. Create and send invoices
  3. 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.

Invoice sent by Claude

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:

  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, get session counts from Google Calendar.
    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 invoices for one client via Deel.
  5. Confirm that 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.
A Xero invoice created by Claude

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

  1. 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.

  2. 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.