What's the one task you keep meaning to systematise but never do? The onboarding checklist, the month-end routine, the "how we do VAT" doc that lives only in your head. Hit reply and tell us — your answer shapes a future issue.

Every firm has the same gap. The way you actually do the monthly bookkeeping, onboard a client, or run the year-end — it lives in one or two people's heads. When they're off, or they leave, it walks out the door with them.

Everyone knows the fix is written procedures. And everyone knows why they don't exist: writing them is slow, boring, and the moment a process changes the document is wrong again. So it stays on the to-do list for years.

Here's what's changed. You no longer have to write the procedure. You do the task once with your screen recording, hand the video to AI, and it writes the step-by-step guide for you — every click, every field, in order. What used to be a half-day of dreaded documenting becomes five minutes of doing a job you were going to do anyway.

And — this is the part that surprises people — the result is often better than the hand-written version. It doesn't skip the "obvious" steps an expert forgets to mention but a new starter desperately needs. It captures exactly what happened, not what you think happens.

This week we'll show you the workflow and the prompt. Let's get into it.

Recording your screen is now built into Windows and Mac and free browser tools — no software to buy. Why it matters: the only thing that ever stood between you and a video SOP was friction, and that's gone.

The desktop app continues to get better at reading what you give it, including recordings. Why it matters: "watch this and write it up" is becoming a genuinely reliable instruction.

Practices are starting to build whole procedure libraries this way — record once, generate, store. Why it matters: the firms doing this are quietly de-risking themselves against staff turnover.

Short and useful. If one of these is relevant to you, tell us and we'll go deeper.

Here's the whole workflow. Pick a task you do regularly — say, posting a purchase invoice in Xero, or your VAT-return review routine.

That's it. A five-minute recording becomes a clean, numbered procedure a new starter could follow without you sitting next to them. Do three of these — your three most-handed-over tasks — and you've started a real SOP library almost by accident.

Fair scepticism — and the honest answer is: yes, with one habit. AI is genuinely good at this because it doesn't get bored and doesn't assume. Where a human writer skips "obvious" steps, the AI lists every field and click it saw. That's exactly what a junior needs.

The habit is this: treat the first draft as a draft. Read it through as if you were the new starter. It can occasionally mislabel a button or miss the why behind a step — so add the judgement, the "if X then check Y," the warning about the client who's always the exception. The AI gives you 90% in five minutes; you supply the last 10% that only an accountant would know.

Do that, and what you hand over is better than most of the hand-written SOPs sitting in shared drives right now — because those were written once, in a hurry, and never checked by fresh eyes.

Record your task, give Claude the video, and paste this:

Run it on a task you know inside-out first, so you can check the output against reality. Once you trust it, it becomes the fastest way in your firm to turn "the thing only Sarah knows how to do" into "the thing anyone can follow."

Got a question you want answered? Reply and ask. The ones we hear most become their own section — this week's came from a reader who didn't trust AI to document a process. Next week's could be yours.