Hi, I'm Damon Millar. I'm an accountant, fractional CFO and business advisor. Most of my week is spent on the advisory side of the desk, which is only possible because the production side runs on a system rather than on whoever is free that Tuesday.

I put this together because the close is where a practice's capacity actually goes, and because the fix being sold at the moment is a new ledger. Your clients are on Xero, QuickBooks and Sage. They are not migrating. This works on what they already have.

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If you want to talk through how it lands in your own practice, book a 30 minute call: https://calendly.com/damon-millar-switchaccountants/30min

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The outcome you'll get

A repeatable close review that runs on four exports, scores a client file before your team opens it, surfaces the movements nobody can explain, drafts the commentary in your firm's wording, and leaves a logged approval trail behind it.

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Your senior still signs everything. The model produces the first draft and the exception list. That is the whole trade.

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What you need before starting

The same four reports from either platform, exported as CSV or Excel. Not PDF. The model reads a PDF badly and you will spend the time you saved fixing transcription.

Alongside those:

• Four consecutive trial balances. Three months of history plus the month you're closing. Fewer than four and the variance sweep in Step 3 has nothing to compare against.
• A Claude account on a paid business tier, so your client data is not used for training. Check the setting yourself rather than assuming it.
• Two or three management accounts commentaries your firm has already written and signed off. Step 5 does not work without them.

Time to budget on the first client: about an hour, most of it spent on Step 2 building the checklist you will then reuse every month. After that, budget 20 to 30 minutes per client per month. Run it on two clients before you quote those numbers to your team, because the honest figure depends on how clean your files are.

Before you upload anything

Four house rules. Set them once, write them into your procedures, and hold the team to them.

1. Strip the client's name and any personal data from file names and headers before upload. Account codes and figures are enough for every prompt here. None of them need to know whose books they are.