Finance routines for Claude: flag the invoice before anyone pays it
One template reads incoming invoices and flags the ones a person should check: possible duplicates, amounts over a limit you set, and vendors it has not seen. It writes a report and never pays, approves or replies. It starts report-only. Free (MIT). Needs a paid Claude plan.
The job: invoice exceptions, checked before payment
Someone in finance reads each incoming invoice and asks three questions: have we seen this before, is the amount unusual, and do we know this vendor.
It is repetitive reading with a few clear rules, which suits a routine that flags and leaves the decision to a person. The scenario below is an example built only from what the template does.
An example week with invoice exceptions
This is an example built from the real templates, not a customer story. It carries no results, numbers or quotes. Say a small finance team points the template at the mailbox or folder where invoices arrive.
- Weekdays, 22:00 UTC: the routine runsIt lists invoices from the last seven days (the default look-back) and reads each into structured fields. It leaves out anything unclear instead of guessing.
- Plain code does the checksA script, not the model, flags duplicates, amounts over your threshold (1000 by default) and vendors not on your known-vendors list. Duplicate checks look back 90 days of recorded invoices.
- You open the DeskThe few flagged invoices land in your Inbox, up to ten per run by default. You decide what to do outside the routine. The routine itself never pays, approves, schedules, replies to or marks anything.
- You teach it your vendorsYou open the Desk and keep, edit or drop what you see. The routine learns from those choices and suggests setting changes. Nothing applies until you say yes. For example, adding a vendor domain to known_vendors stops it being flagged as new.
The finance template
What it never does
These come from the template prompts. They are rules the prompt forbids and the checks around it. They are not a promise about every possible run.
- The prompt forbids paying, approving, scheduling, replying to or marking any invoice.
- Every flag is a prompt for a person to check, not a decision.
- Reading a PDF can misread an amount or number, so the routine leaves out unclear values.
- An older duplicate than 90 days of recorded invoices is not caught.
Where to go from here
Read the invoice exceptions page for install steps and settings. See the other teams on all use cases, read how approvals and learning work, or check the honest limits.
Install invoice exceptions
Run it report-only, check the first flags against invoices you already know, then tune the threshold.