Ecom CFO Notebook - the Claude skill for your books

Ecom CFO Notebook is a (mostly) strategic finance publication for $10M+ ecommerce operators.

What I write comes from the patterns, problems, and decisions from our client work at Ecom CFO - providing brands outsourced CFO, accounting, and financial operations.

I write because I enjoy it. And because it brings in great clients.

My inbox is open - respond to this email or schedule a call if you want to be one of them.

I've had hundreds of calls with founders over the past few years. $1.5M brands. $100M brands. Everything in between.

When I ask what's wrong with their books, almost no founder can tell me specifically.

They know something's off. They just can't name it.

Why else would they call me?

How accounting firms assess your books

When founders realize their books are a problem, they get anxious. They need to make decisions and move forward but they’re frustrated because they can’t determine how big and how deep the problems are.

They just know, for example, that Quickbooks doesn’t match Shopify. Or inventory looks wrong. Or they see a big number on the balance sheet they can’t explain.

The only logical next step becomes shopping for a new CFO firm.

They get on a few calls. Two or three firms do a quick look at their Quickbooks as part of the sales process.

I'm one of these firms.

Depending on the company, I'm looking at the P&L, I’m looking at the balance sheet, checking reconciliation history if I have time.

I'm looking for my five or ten things to build the best proposal in the time I have available. 

But, even I'm not consistent with what I look at in those assessments.

There's no way to manually review everything. Every time. For every potential client.

So you end up with a brief, uneven picture that's shaped by whatever happened to catch my eye that day.

The founder has no idea what went into it. What was checked. What was skipped. Whether another firm would have flagged completely different issues.

That inconsistency is the gap I wanted to close — for DTC in general, and honestly for my own process too.

What I built - the Claude Quickbooks Assessment

Whether you’re shopping for a new firm or just wanting to get clarity about your books, you now have the same power as a seasoned CFO.

I built a Quickbooks (maybe works for Xero too?) assessment plugin in Claude specifically for DTC brands.

It has a 33-point checklist and is structured around three questions that actually matter for your business.

1. Are your books accurate? 

2. Are they timely? 

3. Are they usable?

The “usable” bucket breaks down further into…

• Can you file taxes with these?

• Do basic management reporting?

• Make cash flow decisions?

• Connect to a dashboard tool and get something meaningful out of it?

These aren't generic accounting questions.

The assessment knows that AR being zero is fine as most DTC brands don't carry traditional receivables.

It checks whether your chart of accounts is structured to capture Shopify discounts and refunds properly. It understands omnichannel. It flags the things that matter for your business, not a construction company or a SaaS startup.

Anybody can open Claude and ask some basic questions.

But without the accounting and finance knowledge, what you get back is generic.

What I built is specific to how DTC businesses actually work.

Running the assessment

The minimum version takes about 10 minutes (I’m on the max Claude plan).

I’ve made it flexible so you can upload as few as three reports to get good output - P&L detail, Balance Sheet detail, transaction list by date — and you'll know more about the state of your books than you've known ever.

Every item gets a red, yellow, or green rating with a plain English explanation (no accounting jargon).

If you want to go deeper, upload up to six or seven reports for a full diagnostic: AP aging, full journal, etc.

One note on privacy: you would be uploading financial documents to Claude to use this assessment. Anthropic is explicit that your data isn't used for training, but make your own call and if you want to start smaller, use the last six months.

The output is an Excel file (I’m still partial to excel over a presentation).

Clean, hierarchical, and built so you can hand it to your bookkeeper, controller, or accounting firm and have an actual conversation. Not just "something feels off", but here's specifically what the assessment found, and here's what I want to understand about it.

You don't even have to run it yourself. Hand it to whoever manages your books. Use the output to ask better questions than you've been able to ask before.

YOU CAN ACCESS THE PLUGIN HERE (complete zip file)

I’m going to continue updating it and I’ll post new versions over the coming weeks.

Final thoughts

The founders I work with aren't going to be the ones building AI tools from scratch.

The biggest wins I'm seeing in DTC finance come from founders using AI to get smarter faster so the conversations they're having with their vendors, their partners, and their team are actually grounded in something real.

Clean books are the foundation. Forecasting, growth planning, cash management — all of it sits on top. If the foundation is shaky and you don't know it, none of the rest of it works.

Over the next few issues I'm going to keep building on this with specific use cases where AI is solving real pain points in DTC finance. Not generic tips. The actual things I'm seeing work.

— Sam

Looking for more? Some of our most popular posts:

1. 2026 Annual Benchmark Report: Key insights from financials across 30+ companies – including revenue growth, margins, ad spend, and more.

2. 2026 Revenue Planning Guide: Our report on macroeconomic indicators, Shopify GMV trends, and same-store revenue benchmarks to give operators a clear, data-backed outlook for 2026.

3. The issue with KPIs: Everyone has tons of data, but doesn’t know what to do with it. This is my take on managing the right metrics.

4. Responsibility Map: I walk through how to define who owns, participates in, and supervises every key finance & accounting deliverable

Did someone forward this to you? If you like it, you can subscribe here