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Skills · Union Square Donuts

Skills for the donut shop.

A skill is a written procedure Claude follows — a workflow described once, in enough detail that it runs the same way every time. These ten cover most of the recurring finance work at a nine-location food business: two point-of-sale systems, cash counted by hand at every store, tips owed across both, and a meals tax filing. Together they're what made a twenty-hour month-end close into a five-hour one.

None of these post anything. Every one produces an import file with the backup behind it, so the entry gets reviewed before it lands in the books.

Month-end close

square-sales-sync

Builds a balanced, QuickBooks-ready journal entry for multi-location Square sales over any date range. It pulls live from the Square reporting API, excludes third-party delivery apps, rolls locations up to accounting classes, maps product categories to revenue accounts, splits cash from card settlement, and books service charges and over/short — then writes a native import file that balances.

This one took the longest to get right, and not because of the code. Five commercial products were demoed first. None of them got the mapping exactly right, and none were as fast.

Replaced $600 a month of software. The skill took ninety minutes to write.
  • Fires on "run the Square JE", "build the Square sales journal entry" for a date range
  • Produces A balanced journal entry as .xlsx and .csv in QuickBooks' native import format
  • You step in You review the entry and its backup, then run the import yourself
fenway-payout-summary

The food hall runs on a different point-of-sale system, so it reports separately. This pulls a sales-and-payment summary day by day — orders, gross, discounts, net, tax, tips, total collected — with a payment-by-tender breakdown underneath and totals that tie out.

Replaced Downloading the report out of the food hall's POS and rebuilding the calculations by hand in Excel formulas.
  • Fires on "pull the payout summary", "Toast sales for these dates", or month-end for that location
  • Produces A formatted workbook, one row per business day, with the tender breakdown reconciled
payroll-je

Takes the payroll reports package as it arrives — a PDF — plus the account mapping, and produces the journal entry with payroll detail broken out by department. At month end it also produces the accrual.

Replaced Multiple reports reconciled in Excel. District managers carry cost allocations across stores and employees work in more than one location — a payroll-to-QuickBooks sync on its own can't express either.
  • Fires on Uploading a payroll PDF, or "run the payroll JE", "accrue the payroll"
  • Produces An Excel workbook with departmental detail and the entry, plus import files carrying account numbers
  • You step in The workbook is the review copy; the import is separate and run by you
tips-reconciliation-usd

Tips arrive from two different point-of-sale systems across every location. This pulls both, for whatever dates you specify, and reconciles them against each other so the two systems agree before anyone gets paid.

Replaced Pulling reports out of both POS systems by hand and combining them into Excel schedules.
  • Fires on "reconcile tips", "tips by location" — and it refuses to pull anything until you supply the dates
  • Produces A reconciliation table and a formatted summary workbook, every run
month-end-deposits-in-transit

Two separate reconciliations that both live in the gap between a month ending and the money arriving: physical cash collected but not yet deposited, and card payouts on the month's revenue that settle to the bank the following month. They're kept as distinct reconciliations in one workbook rather than netted together, because they break for different reasons.

Replaced The same manual routine — reports pulled from both POS systems and combined into Excel schedules.
  • Fires on Month-end close, "cash in transit", "payouts crossing month-end"
  • Produces One workbook, two reconciliations, each tying to its own ledger account
  • Access Read-only against every system it touches
depreciation-scheduler

Maintains the fixed asset register and the depreciation schedule behind it — additions, disposals, the monthly depreciation run, and the tie-out back to the fixed asset accounts in the general ledger.

Replaced An Excel sheet kept up by hand.
  • Fires on "add a new asset", "run depreciation", "process a disposal", "what's the NBV of our assets"
  • Produces An updated register and schedule, reconciled to the ledger

Reporting & planning

location-pnl-allocations

Produces the fully-loaded P&L by location. A store's own P&L is the easy part; the useful part is pushing commissary and overhead costs out to the stores that actually drive them, following the management allocation methodology rather than splitting evenly.

Replaced Complex Excel files whose formulas broke.
  • Fires on "run the May allocation report", "fully-loaded P&L by location", "month-end allocations"
  • Produces A three-sheet workbook plus a refreshed allocation dashboard
usd-projection-update

Once a month closes, its actuals replace the forecast in the three-statement model and the projection rolls forward. Doing this by hand is where models quietly drift out of agreement with the books.

Replaced nothing This was the first five-year projection the business ever had. It didn't automate an existing process — it made one easier to build, iterate on, and keep updated.
  • Fires on "we closed August, update the projections", "refresh the model with actuals"
  • Produces The updated model with the closed month actualized and the forecast rolled

Operations

square-donut-count-grab

Reconstructs what was actually on the shelf at any store at any past moment, by taking current inventory and replaying the change log backwards to the time in question. Answers the question you can't otherwise answer after the fact: how many did we have left, and of what.

Replaced nothing Nobody was doing this by hand, because it wasn't practical enough to ask. It's a question the business didn't previously have a way to answer.
  • Fires on "how many donuts did we have left", "what was on the shelf Saturday morning", "inventory snapshot at 3pm"
  • Scope Individual donuts by flavor, any location, any date or time
creditapps

Vendor credit applications all ask for the same thirty fields in a different order — entity details, banking, trade references. This fills them from a saved business profile instead of retyping them each time a new supplier wants net terms.

Replaced Filling out every new vendor application by hand, references and all.
  • Fires on Uploading a credit application, vendor form, or net-terms application PDF
  • You step in You review and sign before anything goes to the supplier

The other side of the same method — six skills for a digital agency →