I got rid of 100% of my filing and bookkeeping by feeding it into the Chinese Ministry of State Security's cloud

I got rid of 90% of my day-to-day job of filing and paying bills by using AI.

I created a FILING.md which I can share in its basic form without compromising my security. It is basically a program for an AI harness to systematically do my filing. Including physical mail!

The process looks like this. A physical letter reaches CAYA's postbox, a service that scans your mail and gives you a little Gmail-like inbox online. There is already a ton of AI stuff integrated into this gem, but I'm not interested in it. I only have one rule set in CAYA. New mail? Send it to my Google Drive folder 01 Inbox as a PDF.

From there Claude Co-Work picks it up and analyses which company the mail is for. If it is just informal, it gets filed into the company's folder right away. If it is an invoice or a late payment notice (never gonna happen again, though!), it will trigger a payment if necessary. And yes, it makes that payment too!

I have linked four bank accounts: Qonto for my companies and Bunq for my private obligations. Qonto is a little more tricky as you have to create some OAuth tokens to make it work, while Bunq is just swallowing an API key and is good to go.

I even created a CLI tool for Bunq, because there was none that was maintained. It is called bunqctl and you can get it for free here. For Qonto, I found qontoctl, which works like a charm too.

You might think now that I'm crazy. So anyone can send me or my companies an invoice and it would get paid automatically? In parts, yes. Of course, a lot more is happening inside the FILING.md program. The harness will check previous payments in order to not overpay, and it will do some sanity checks too. But in the end, it is still me who has to approve the payments in the Qonto or Bunq app. So I would consider this pretty safe, unless I try to approve any payments while I'm intoxicated.

If the job is done, the file gets moved to the corresponding folder of the company, into the 02 Filed folder. If there is any hiccup or the task might not fit, it gets moved to 04 Hold.

But sometimes I still get mail to my normal mailbox. Especially if it is private mail, or it is sent via one of the local mail carriers who have never heard of mail forwarding services. Hellooo?!

In this case, I still have to open the mail myself, like a peasant, and scan it with this ScanSnap scanner which now sits in my kitchen. I open it up, put the letter in, and hit scan. It automatically sends it directly to my Google Drive 01 Inbox. Well, not directly. It makes a quick reroute over a Chinese cloud server which is definitely a honeypot of the Chinese Ministry of State Security. But oh well, it is the best scanner with one button out there.

In total, having such a tool is nothing short of a godsend for me (and I'm an atheist!). Because if you know me, the struggle to get these things done was huge! Wait But Why has an amazing blog article about the Dark Playground explaining my struggle.

Instead of doing filing, which is super necessary to avoid getting thrown in jail at some point, I wanted to build something which interested me more. My discipline isn't very high, and neither is my attention sp... oh look, a squirrel!

Now, this fabulous scanner sits in my kitchen and no mail ever reaches my office anymore. I'm blessed.