I Built My Own AI Agent to Reconcile My Books. Here's Where It Breaks.

I built my own AI agent to reconcile my books.

It logs into Xero, pulls the bank statements, and runs the reconciliation report. Matches opening and closing balances on its own.

It works, about 80% of the time. The other 20%, I'm babysitting it. It hits a permissions wall. It gets confused mid-task. It needs me to click through a login flow it can't handle by itself. I'm the only one who knows how to run it, which makes it automation with a chaperone.

That's the DIY tradeoff. Claude and other general-purpose agents are incredibly flexible. You can point them at almost anything. But flexible and reliable are two different problems, and building an agent for one specific job inside one specific system is a different exercise than pointing a general agent at your browser and hoping.

So which one should your firm actually use? A DIY agent you build yourself, or one built specifically for accounting work?

I'm digging into that live with Sasha Orloff from Puzzle on August 13 at 10:00 AM PT. We're comparing DIY Claude agents against purpose-built accounting agents, sharing real examples of both, and talking through where DIY works, where it breaks, and how firms actually get value from AI today.

If you're trying to grow without adding headcount, this is worth an hour.

Register here: https://streamyard.com/watch/hQ4pUFYw7CJq