The licenses had arrived, but the reporting was still done by hand
The firm gave its team Claude the same week we started. A few people had tried AI tools on their own, but no one was using Claude in their daily work. The workload will sound familiar to any firm that runs on spreadsheets. Every Monday, someone spent hours pulling bank activity and investigating every large swing for the weekly cash report. Monthly results came from nine third-party property managers in a mix of Excel files and PDFs. Underwriting a new site meant rebuilding comps and budget assumptions by hand from past deals.
Each division worked on the reports it produces every week
I began with a walk-through of each division’s reporting and the files it actually produces. After three sessions for the full team on how to use the tools safely and how to save a process so Claude follows it the same way every time, each division had working sessions on its own weekly and monthly reports, built on screen with its own files. The team kept building between sessions, so each session picked up from their progress.
The Monday cash report now runs itself
In fund accounting’s first working session, we rebuilt the cash report around transaction-level bank exports. Claude rolls the prior week forward, calculates new balances and lists every flagged change with its likely driver. A week later, it ran on its own every time new bank files landed in its folder, and it matched the manual report when the team checked it. The hours of Monday assembly are gone, and the work left is reviewing what the report flags.
The development team now fills its underwriting template from a few inputs and a library of past budgets and operating results, with market comps that used to be pulled together by hand filling in automatically. Its first AI-drafted construction draw memo saved two to three hours of manual keying.
The team keeps improving its own workflows
After each run, the team asks Claude to review the corrections they made and update the standing instructions, so the same fix is never needed twice. By the final sessions, people were bringing workflows they had built on their own and asking about connecting Claude directly to their source systems.