Craig Mod, on creating his own custom accounting software with Claude Code:
Simply put: It’s a big mess, and no off-the-shelf accounting
software does what I need. So after years of pain, I finally sat
down last week and started to build my own. It took me about five
days. I am now using the best piece of accounting software I’ve
ever used. It’s blazing fast. Entirely local. Handles multiple
currencies and pulls daily (historical) conversion rates. It’s
able to ingest any CSV I throw at it and represent it in my
dashboard as needed. It knows US and Japan tax requirements, and
formats my expenses and medical bills appropriately for my
accountants. I feed it past returns to learn from. I dump 1099s
and K1s and PDFs from hospitals into it, and it categorizes and
organizes and packages them all as needed. It reconciles
international wire transfers, taking into account small variations
in FX rates and time for the transfers to complete. It learns as I
categorize expenses and categorizes automatically going forward.
It’s easy to do spot checks on data. If I find an anomaly, I can
talk directly to Claude and have us brainstorm a batched solution,
often saving me from having to manually modify hundreds of
entries. And often resulting in a new, small, feature tweak. The
software feels organic and pliable in a form perfectly shaped to
my hand, able to conform to any hunk of data I throw at it. It
feels like bushwhacking with a lightsaber.
Don’t get distracted by the mountains of steaming shit that hacks are using these tools to spew. There are amazing things being built by these tools that never would have, or in some cases could have, been built before.
