A retail group asks Claude how its stores did yesterday

This week we connected a retail group's till figures to Claude, so its managers can ask how each store did and get the answer in their finance team's own layout. We also built an AI assistant that prices a builder's bill of quantities, tested Claude skills for a freight company against a sample month, and moved Jon's day onto one page that Claude writes each morning.

A retail group's managers ask Claude how each store did, in the finance team's own layout

After the shops close, a retail group's finance team sends out the day's sales against target for every store, and keeps weekly, monthly and stock sheets in the same shape. We have connected those figures to Claude. A manager opens Claude and asks how each store did yesterday, or which supplier's stock is running low, and the answer comes back laid out the way the finance team lays it out.

A small program on the group's own server reads the till system's database through a login that can only read, and sends the new figures every five minutes to a private store. Claude reaches them through a connector with a tool for each of the finance team's sheets, and a Claude skill for each kind of report tells it how to set the figures out. Each manager sees only the figures for their own part of the business.

Nobody watches a server, so this one is watched for them. If no figures arrive for 20 minutes, our team gets an email straight away, and another when the figures flow again. A report at 06:30 each morning says how the night went.

The connector, the skills and the alerts are built and tested end to end against a test database. The program goes onto the group's server next.

Built with Claude, a custom connector, Claude skills, Vercel and Resend

An AI assistant that prices a builder's bill of quantities

A bill of quantities lists every material a building job needs, often in hundreds of lines of a quantity surveyor's shorthand. For a supplier, finding the lines it can fill means reading every one of them.

For a building products supplier, we built an assistant that reads the whole bill, picks out the lines the supplier can fill, matches each one to a product by what it does, and reads the quantity each line needs. A plain script then counts the packs and prices them from the supplier's own price list, so every total traces back to a listed price. On a 523-line sample bill it found every line the supplier can fill and left the look-alikes out.

We also taught the supplier's demo chatbot what to do when a customer asks for another brand's product by name: it answers with the supplier's own equivalent. The next step is running the quoting assistant on one of the supplier's real bills.

Built with Claude and Python

Claude skills that cost, quote and track a freight company's jobs

A skill is a set of written instructions Claude follows for one job, with the files it needs. For a freight and logistics company, we wrote skills for job costing, quoting, shipment tracking and reconciliation. Each one reads the company's job records through a connector and follows the steps the company's own staff follow.

We tested them before anyone at the company relies on them. For a sample month, a script worked out the right answers from the records first: each job's revenue, cost and gross profit, and the charges that were never passed on to a customer. Claude's report was then marked against those answers, and the job-costing skill passed all 19 checks on both Claude Sonnet 5.5 and Claude Opus 5.5. The quoting skill works out the cost and selling price per container from the rate files and writes the quote email with the costs left out.

The skills are ready for the company's team to try in their own Claude.

Built with Claude skills, a custom connector, Claude Sonnet 5.5 and Claude Opus 5.5

One page Claude writes for Jon each morning

Jon's day now starts on a single page that Claude writes before he does: the day's meetings with their preparation, the tasks due, and replies waiting to go, already drafted.

Buttons on the page save a Gmail draft, post to Slack or open WhatsApp. Anything the page cannot do by itself, such as sending from the studio's email address or updating a task, is saved for Claude to carry out. Each morning's page starts as a copy of the day before, so earlier days are one click away in the list on the left.

We are setting up the same page for the rest of our team, each one built in that person's own Claude so its buttons act as them. The same works for any business owner: one page each morning, drawn from their own inbox, calendar and task list.

Built with Claude, Claude Code, Gmail, Slack and Google Calendar

Also this week

• Email from our AI waits until morningWhen Claude Code is about to email someone outside the studio between 19:00 and 05:00, it now asks first, and unless told to send, schedules the email for 06:00.
• A sales dashboard that matches the finance team's sheetsFor the same retail group, we rebuilt its sales dashboard so each page is one of the finance team's own sheets, with their labels and column order. The new version passed 143 automated checks.

Next workshop: AI in Business on Wednesday 11 November in Harare

Studio news

• Book a workshop seat in the chatPress Book a seat on the 11 November workshop page and register in the chat with your name, phone, email and how many people you are bringing. A copy comes to you by email.
• Short films from the 21 October morningThe workshops page now has clips filmed in the room at Sabre, so you can see how the morning is taught before you book.

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Our podcasts are written by AI and read by AI voices. They are free in any podcast app.