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Do you like doing bookkeeping? Probably not.

Last week, I met with a CEO whose team burns hours daily on determining where to classify unknown transactions.

Here’s their old process:

Their bookkeeper gets 14 credit card and bank account feeds. Unknown items?

She adds the transactions in a spreadsheet and sends them to the CEO and the finance lead.

They huddle over transactions, debate categories, then send decisions back through Slack.

She updates QuickBooks, updates items, and repeats the process Monday through Friday.

Every single day.

“Share your screen with me,” I said.

The THINK Process:

Instead of fighting the unknown transactions, we redesigned their workflow:

T - Task: Stop the spreadsheet chaos. Handle unknowns systematically.

H - Hypothesis: Create two holding accounts in QuickBooks: “Unknown Deposits” and “Unknown Expenses.” Route mystery items there automatically.

I - Invest: We built the new approach using their existing software tools:

1. Created two unknown accounts in QuickBooks (One for deposits, the other for expenses)

2. Set up Zapier to watch for transactions in those accounts

3. Connected it to send those items to the Google Sheet

4. Used Google Drive to store classification rules and data that the classifier uses to analyze and suggest mappings

5. Created a dashboard showing real-time classification recommendations to approve or override

N - Network: When complete, unknown transactions will hit those accounts, Zapier will trigger the Google Sheet, the AI will review patterns and suggest categories, and the dashboard will show everything pending review.

K - Knowledge: The AI classification employee will get smarter with each transaction, learning their patterns.

When completed, instead of spending hours figuring out how to categorize transactions, they’ll verify if they agree with the digital employees' classification and approve it or make changes by reviewing a dashboard

They can see where everything stands faster instead of chasing down individual transactions.

Four hours will become 30 minutes of approval decisions.

“I’ll will finally have a way to do this without it taking so long, ,” the CEO said.

That happens when you build systems instead of disconnected tasks.

Try doing something similar to assist you with your bookeeping tasks.

To get other ideas I put a new course in the Work Less, Do More community with a library of prompts you can test.

Access it here.

Marvin