I love using AI to do the work I hate doing
By Arun Valecha, AV Services — Linux Infrastructure Expert since 1999
I got into this business to fix servers. Not to reconcile invoices.
But somewhere between “job’s done” and “job’s actually closed,” there’s a pile of accounting work nobody signs up for. GST returns. LUT filings. Chasing down which retainer client paid this month and which one’s overdue. That work doesn’t disappear just because I don’t want to do it, and it doesn’t disappear just because I’m not good at it either.
I run this solo. No full-time accountant, because a one-person Linux consultancy can’t carry that salary line, not yet. So for years, the accounting either got done badly, or got done at 11pm the night before a deadline, or didn’t get done until a GST notice made it urgent.
Why I’ve always dreaded it
Three things sat at the bottom of my list, every single month.
GST filing. Matching invoices to what actually got paid, categorizing expenses correctly, making sure the numbers on the return match the numbers in the bank statement. None of it is conceptually hard for someone trained in it. For me, it’s a skill I never built and never wanted to build, so every return felt like starting from zero.
Invoicing and follow-up. Sending the invoice is easy. Remembering which of six retainer clients paid, which one’s a week late, and which one needs a polite nudge, that used to live entirely in my head, which meant it lived nowhere reliable at all.
Expense tracking. Every AWS bill, every domain renewal, every small tool subscription, sorted into the right category for the year-end filing. I’d let two months pile up, then lose an entire evening reconstructing what I’d spent money on.
This wasn’t a time problem. It was a skill and interest problem. I could have blocked out an entire weekend for GST prep and still done it badly, because more hours don’t fix not knowing what you’re doing.
What changed
I started using Claude and ChatGPT for the first pass on all three. Not the filing decisions, the prep work I don’t have the training for.
I feed one of them raw numbers, bank statement exports, invoice records, expense receipts, and it comes back with a structured draft: categorized expenses, a reconciliation summary, a clear list of who’s paid and who hasn’t. I check every number against the source before anything goes near an actual GST return. That checking step is still real work. But the part that used to stall me completely, not knowing how to even start categorizing an ambiguous expense, that part gets handled in a way I could never have done myself no matter how much time I gave it.
That’s the actual shift. It’s not that a two-hour task became a fifteen-minute task. It’s that a task I genuinely lacked the skill to do well now gets done well, by something that has that skill, while I supply the judgment and the verification.
What it actually took off my head
I want to be specific about this, because “saves time” undersells it.
I used to carry a low, constant hum of pressure about the books. Not urgent, never quite the emergency that a crashed server is, but always there. A voice reminding me something was probably falling behind, that I didn’t fully trust my own handle on where the money stood. That kind of pressure doesn’t show up on a to-do list. It shows up as the thing you avoid opening your laptop for on a Sunday.
Handing the first pass to Claude and ChatGPT didn’t just clear tasks off a list. It cleared that hum. I open the numbers now and see a structured draft waiting instead of a blank spreadsheet and a skill I don’t have. The dread wasn’t really about the hours the work took. It was about facing something I felt genuinely bad at, alone, every single month. That’s gone, even on the weeks where the actual reconciliation still takes a while.
A real filing I almost missed
There’s an LUT filing, the Letter of Undertaking that lets me invoice international clients without charging GST upfront, that I nearly let lapse earlier this year. I knew it existed. I did not have a system for tracking when it needed renewal, because building that system required exactly the kind of organized, detail-oriented habit I don’t naturally have.
Now filing deadlines and required documentation get tracked and drafted in advance, because I finally have a way to offload the organizing itself, not just the hours it takes. I filed it early instead of finding out from a GST department notice. That’s not a time savings. That’s a gap in how I operate, closed by tools that are simply better at that particular kind of work than I am.
What I still won’t hand over
The actual filing. The decision on how to categorize a genuinely ambiguous expense. Whether a client’s overdue invoice needs a firm email or a phone call. That’s judgment, and it’s mine, the same way diagnosing a server issue is mine even when AI helps me write up the report afterward.
I don’t trust AI-generated numbers blindly, not when GST penalties and interest are the downside of getting it wrong. Every reconciliation, every categorized expense, every filing draft gets checked against the actual bank statement and the actual invoice before it goes anywhere official. That verification step isn’t optional, and it isn’t fast. But it’s a check now, not a full rebuild from zero skill every time.
Why I’m not just hiring an accountant
The obvious answer is: hire someone. And eventually, at a certain client count, that’s probably right.
Right now, a full-time accountant is a fixed monthly cost for work that, most weeks, adds up to a few hours. What used to make even a part-time CA relationship harder was showing up with a shoebox of invoices and a skill gap I hadn’t closed. Now I can hand a CA clean, categorized, reconciled numbers instead. Not because I got faster. Because Claude and ChatGPT cover the part of this job I was never going to be good at, no matter how much time I put in.
The part I didn’t expect
I thought this would just save time. It saved something closer to my attention, and my Sunday evenings.
I stopped avoiding the accounting, not because it got shorter, but because it stopped being the one part of my week where I felt out of my depth. The judgment is still mine. The numbers still get the same scrutiny they always needed. But the pressure of facing a skill I never had, alone, every month, is off my head. For a one-person business without room for a full-time accountant, that’s the actual thing that changed.
Arun Valecha runs AV Services, providing Linux server management, disaster recovery, and infrastructure consulting for businesses across India.