💌 Two days a month, handed back
9 September 2026
buildwitholi
[AGENDA] In today's newsletter
- [UPDATE] Writing from Zimbabwe
- [CASE STUDY] Two hundred invoices a month, and the cousin who typed them
- [RESOURCE] Why Claude keeps being nearly right
- [THE ECOSYSTEM] Got a job that's taking you two days a month?
[UPDATE] Writing from Zimbabwe
Hey,
Incredibly fortunate and grateful to say this one is coming to you from Zimbabwe/Botswana.
Lack of signal and roaming allowances have definitely limited the amount of Clauding I've been able to do, but what is it all for if you don't step away from it every now and again, aye.
I've managed to keep up with the daily videos from out here, mainly inspired by interesting conversations I've had (or as others may put it, me chewing people's ears off about what they're using AI for...).
I'm back on the 19th, so one more newsletter from out here, then back to the routine.
[CASE STUDY] Two hundred invoices a month, and the cousin who typed them
Last week I gave you a case study from my ecosystem course on someone automating their newsletter, and this week it's invoice reconciliation.
The background, his family runs a bakery in Colombia, and his cousin does the books.
Around two hundred invoices arrive in the bakery's inbox every month, and every one of them was being opened and typed into the accounts system by hand, taking two to three days.
So that's what we went after.
An agent that reads every invoice and attachment out of the inbox, PDF or XML, writes it into a spreadsheet in the shape the books need, and files the email as done so nothing gets read twice.
Not only this, but three things came back that nobody had asked for:
- It noticed that VAT numbers were mistyped on some of the invoices, which could stop the bakery claiming the tax back.
- A question about why prices were moving so much month to month for certain produce.
- Why they were buying quite so much soap.
To round it off, the last step was an additional file in the exact shape the accounts system takes, so it's uploaded instead of typed.
His figure, not mine, is that what used to take two to three days every month now takes 15 minutes, allowing the saved time to go to supporting the customers instead.
And in his words, "Very happy I have a use case which we're using productively already."
[RESOURCE] Why Claude keeps being nearly right
The complaint I hear most about Claude is not that it is wrong, it is that it is nearly right, close enough that you fix it by hand and get on with your day.
A fair amount of the time the reason is memory, because it has been building a picture of you out of passing remarks for months, and every answer since has been sat on top of it.
Right now there is a button in your settings that hands you that picture as a plain text file, and Anthropic's help page says it is there until today, the 9th, so if you're reading this on the day, go and press it now.
It's called exporting your legacy memory, it's about four clicks, and I walked through where it is in Friday's video.
Read what comes back as assumptions rather than facts and you usually find one entry that was true for an afternoon months ago and has been quietly steering everything since.
Then use the prompts on the page below to rewrite it and form the base of your own ecosystem, or simply ask Claude to update its memory.
[THE ECOSYSTEM] Got a job that's taking you two days a month?
Hopefully you found this one interesting, or even useful.
If any of it has resonated, and there's a job in your business that's quietly eating two days a month, I'm back on the 19th.
Book in a call for after that and we can talk about how to set these systems up for you.
Chat soon,
Oli