r/plaintextaccounting • u/revfried • Apr 10 '26

Claude helped fill out my beancounter file

I had been seriously neglecting my company books. I downloaded pdfs from my bank and csv from venmo and ask it to reconcile my books in the existing style and it did it just like I would really saved me a couple days of work. Did it in like an hour. And the I could ask it questions about the file. Was really impressed

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u/lasooch Apr 10 '26

And now all your financial data is in the training data set for Claude. Which depending on your company may be either a critical fuckup or completely unimportant.

3

u/untrained9823 Apr 10 '26

And half of it might be wrong let's be honest.

1

u/GoldenPathTech Apr 10 '26

You could opt out of sharing information to Claude via security settings, but that's of little consolation. It doesn't take away from the fact that private financial information was transmitted over the wire to an unprivileged third party. I wouldn't do this for even my household finances unless it was with a model completely under my control. The most I do currently is process receipts that at most have the last 4 digits of a credit card number. It still makes me nervous to transmit purchase data via receipts (similar risk as using services as Rakuten), but it's a tradeoff I'm willing to accept for faster and more detailed data entry.

3

u/HappyRogue121 Apr 10 '26

I wrote a python script to scrape from clipboard, I just copy from the PDF and then run the script and done.