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Month-End Close

Draft Adjusting Journal Entries for Review with Claude

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Short answer

Give Claude your trial balance, chart of accounts and the support for each adjustment, and ask for draft adjusting journal entries that balance, use only your accounts and cite their support. You review and post them; Claude does not.

What the source describes

Anthropic's prompt engineering overview says to start with three things: a clear definition of the success criteria for your use case, some way to test against those criteria, and a first draft prompt you want to improve. It points to Anthropic's prompting best practices for the techniques themselves, from clarity and examples to XML structuring, role prompting, thinking and prompt chaining. It also notes that not every failing result is best solved by prompt engineering. For adjusting entries, the success criteria are easy to write down: every entry balances, uses only accounts on the chart, and names its support.

Result or outcome

According to the source, Anthropic's Prompting best practices page is the living reference for prompting techniques, and the overview's own advice is to define success criteria and a way to test them before refining a prompt.

How to run it

  1. Write down the success criteria before you prompt: every entry balances, uses only accounts on the chart, names its support, and invents nothing.
  2. Export the unadjusted trial balance and the chart of accounts, and gather the support for each adjustment, such as the policy, the bills or the fixed asset schedule.
  3. Paste the prompt on this page, keeping each input inside its own tag so Claude can tell the chart, the trial balance and the adjustments apart.
  4. Check each drafted entry against your criteria and answer anything listed under QUESTIONS FOR REVIEW.
  5. Post the approved entries in your accounting software yourself, and keep the support with the month's close file.

Try it yourself

Copyable prompt

You are helping me draft month-end adjusting journal entries for [client] for the month ending [date]. Nothing you draft will be posted until I review it.
<chart_of_accounts>[paste account numbers and names]</chart_of_accounts>
<trial_balance>[paste the unadjusted trial balance]</trial_balance>
<adjustments_needed>[list each item and its support, for example: utilities for the month not yet billed, estimated from the last three bills; prepaid insurance, 12-month policy starting [date] for [amount]; depreciation per the attached fixed asset schedule]</adjustments_needed>
Success criteria: every entry balances; every account is on the chart of accounts; every line names the support it relies on; nothing is invented. Return one table per entry with date, account number, account name, debit, credit and memo, then a list of the assumptions you made. If an item is missing information, do not guess: put it under QUESTIONS FOR REVIEW. Do not decide tax treatment.

Replace the [bracketed] placeholders. Remove client names, account numbers, and personal data before pasting into any AI tool.

The prompt also works in ChatGPT, Gemini or Grok.

What to review

Recalculate every amount from its support, confirm each entry balances and uses the right period, and check that accruals reverse when they should. Claude drafts the entries; the person closing the books approves them, and anything with tax consequences goes to a tax professional.

Related free download: Month-End Close Checklist for Small Business Bookkeepers (Printable checklist (PDF))

Source: Claude Docs (Prompt engineering overview)

Not professional advice. This is general information, not accounting, tax, legal or financial advice. Check AI output yourself and consult a licensed professional for your situation. See our Terms of Use.

This entry summarizes a public source. Features, plans, and availability change, so confirm details with the vendor. Tool names are trademarks of their respective owners.

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