How I make detailed SOPs for my accounting team quickly

When our teams need to learn new month-end close procedures quickly, I'm the one who typically needs to come up with the SOP. If you're the only senior person on a small accounting team, that's probably you too. Making SOPs was always a time-consuming process for me.

Maybe I'm just extra slow, but a detailed SOP would typically take me 3-4 hours, and it was not unusual for it to become an all-day thing.

So I either resorted to recording Loom videos or making short bullet points. But SOPs that are too short are not useful for junior team members if you want to turn a judgment task into a procedural task. And some of the processes could get pretty long, 15-20 minute videos - people will watch them the first time.

But I found that rarely will they watch them a 3rd or 4th time, which is a problem - they need a way to get to just the specific step they forgot, not the entire process.

With this kind of setup, there are two problems:

1. People can't watch long videos multiple times - it's not efficient.
2. It's also not very efficient for AI to read your instructions to help you with the close process.

How I set it up¶

The solution I found that works for me is ... have Claude do it. It took me a little while to figure it out - but essentially what the process looks like is:

• Set up a local folder on your computer (I called it _tutorials just so it's first in my Documents alphabetically).
• Each subfolder is a video I record where Claude makes the tutorial.
• The recordings can be anything - could be a Zoom meeting or a recording you do on your own - you talk through the process, it doesn't have to be pretty.

Recorder tip

In Zoom, turn on Settings → Recording → "Optimize for 3rd party video editor" - my recordings went from 149 to 467 kbps and the text on the screen became readable. Zoom caps at 1080p, so if you know ahead of time you're making a tutorial - use a real screen recorder. A 4k monitor will help Claude see all the details.

The part that took me a long time with videos was mistakes. If I misspoke or did steps out of order, I either had to edit the video or, if it wasn't salvageable, re-record the whole thing. That's what I wanted to fix, because that was the most time-consuming part.

Claude needs a few tools to process and transcribe the videos on your computer. Have it download them into your main tutorial folder one time (about 1.4 GB) - otherwise it will re-download them every time:

• ffmpeg: cuts the video and pulls the screenshots.
• Two Whisper transcription models: a large one for accuracy and a small English one for long videos - they run on your computer, free and offline.
• The Python runtime for the models: saved as install files, so it sets up in under a second with no download.
• transcribe.py: a short script Claude made for my setup - it sends the audio to the models and saves the transcript with timestamps next to the video. Your own Claude may build something similar.
• Access to the folder: you add the _tutorials folder (or name it whatever you want) to the chat once and click allow.

The important part that Claude gives me back is a cut list. It'll review my videos, and it'll cut out all the pieces where I misspeak or where I make corrections.

Even if I say the wrong number on the screen, it'll add a yellow box on the screen with the correct number. It can reshuffle clips if I misspeak out of order.

Sometimes during the process, I even think of a different process that I should document - and while I'm recording, I not only talk through the SOP I'm recording, I'm also talking to Claude to make a note, something like:

"Um so this step is actually a process for our credit card review process - not related to the flux analysis."

This way, when it reads back what I said, it knows there are certain clips it can reshuffle.

What it gives you back is a Word document with all the steps processed. Also, if you're using Notion, Slite, Confluence, or any one of these tools, it can just directly create your knowledge base right there.

I started with the Word doc to proofread it and check for myself to make sure everything makes sense. After that, you can import it into your knowledge base.

What Claude gives you back¶

• The written SOP: background, critical items to know, then the steps - full screenshots with red boxes on what to click.
• Short clips: for steps that are about getting somewhere, a 10-second clip. It's a little better than a GIF because you can control it - and it's more than an image because it gives you a little motion.
• The cut list: I keep some of the navigation - you do want to see where you go from screen to screen.

A five-minute video probably takes Claude 20 minutes give or take - with two or three inputs from you once in a while.

You don't have to sit there and wait for it to finish - you can work on a couple of tutorials at the same time.

Skim the draft before it goes in the wiki - tell it to remove a step, add a screenshot or merge screenshots.

An additional bonus - on a multi-step process that could take 10 steps, a very detailed SOP lets Claude take you from step 1 through 8 if the steps are outlined.

The same SOP that teaches a person is the instruction set Claude follows. The steps where it's not so good (yet) are the judgment calls, and those are the ones you want a person on anyway. But just make sure judgment calls are not discussed as really, really long procedures that you didn't write down yet.

This is how our team documents every client's close.