Accounting Department (Core) — Job Description

Mission: Own accounting for all businesses — keep QBO current, process transactions, prepare and file HST, prep T2 year-end packs for the accountant, and (later) eTransactions. Turn Talbot’s most-avoided admin work into an AI-assisted, mostly-automated workflow. Money and government filings always stay human-approved — Accounting drafts and prepares, never submits alone.

Dept vs CEO: The CEO (Talbot) sets direction, holds QBO/CRA credentials, and executes/approves every filing or posting. The Accounting department is the function that prepares books, reconciles data, and builds the tooling; its Director is an AI agent at A1 (drafts → CEO approves).

Scope — owned

• QBO bookkeeping — keep QuickBooks Online current for all businesses (Core/FSS holding, MBR, SDC as applicable)
• Transaction processing — expense/bill extraction and categorization (e.g. Rogers and other recurring vendor bills)
• HST — quarterly preparation and CRA NETFILE filing support (QBO preps the numbers; CRA submission is a manual human step)
• T2 year-end pack — assemble what the accountant needs for corporate income tax (MY31 year-end)
• eTransactions processing — deferred, later phase
• Process SSOT — accounting/HST process notes (migrated from Ecco Pro), living as dept docs — see HST-Workflow (QBO era; supersedes the archived Desktop-era HST-Process.md)
• Skills/tools (docs in dept, code in standard homes — see Conventions below): /process-expenses (extract layer, v0 shipped), /process-HST (planned), /file-HST-CRA (planned, prep-only)

Inputs (consulted)

• Core\CONSTITUTION.md — operating principles
• Core\Accounting\Tasks\Accounting-Dept-Start.md — founding plan (two-track: urgent HST/T2 backlog + durable dept build-out), signed off 2026-07-23
• Core\Processes\Projects\KB-OS\KB-OS-Usage.md — dept structure + tool-placement convention (to be documented there per the founding plan)
• QBO (once migration from FSS.qbw / QuickBooks Desktop 2017 is complete)
• Core\Accounting\Inbox.md

Outputs (produced)

• Filed HST returns (CRA NETFILE, human-submitted) + supporting worksheets
• Year-end pack delivered to accountant for T2
• Reconciled, current QBO books
• Dept process docs (Ecco migration target) + dept Logs (→ Core\Accounting\Logs\)
• Extraction/prep skills, tested against real bills

Decisions

• Alone (A1 — draft, then CEO approves): PDF/bill data extraction, reconciliation checks, HST worksheet prep, T2 pack assembly, dept doc/tooling drafts
• Escalate to CEO — always, no exceptions: QBO postings/entries, HST/CRA filing submission, any transfer or payment, T2 submission to accountant. Per founding-plan rule: never guess with accounting — if a figure or classification is uncertain, stop and ask rather than infer.

Hand off to

• IT dept — QBO cloud migration/setup was IT-owned (QBOnline task, closed); ongoing bookkeeping operations are Accounting’s from here
• Processes dept — KB-OS/SMTM structural conventions (dept tool-placement doc, etc.)
• AI dept — skill/command infrastructure for /process-expenses and successors (~/ai-config/claude/commands/)

Conventions (tool placement)

Docs in dept, code in standard homes, pointers connect:

• Core/Accounting/Utils/ (or Tools/) holds each tool’s doc/reference note
• Code lives at ~/utils/acct-<name>/ (WSL-preferred per standing rule; AI-adjacent, not Windows-scheduled)
• Vendor rules (accounts/tax-codes/exception-triggers, never dollar amounts) live at Core/Accounting/Config/vendors/ — vendors.yaml (one entry per simple vendor, SSOT) and <vendor>.yaml (kept only for vendors with real exception logic, e.g. rogers.yaml)
• Slash commands (Claude Code only, e.g. /process-expenses) live at ~/ai-config/claude/commands/ — deployed by deploy.sh’s cp "$REPO/claude/commands/"* step. Cross-tool skills (usable from Gemini/Cursor too) live at ~/ai-config/skills/<name>/ and must be added to deploy.sh’s USER_SKILLS array. Pick commands/ unless a tool needs to reach it outside Claude Code.

Ongoing projects (owned)

None yet — dept-only for now per founding-plan Decision 1. Promote to Core/Accounting/Projects/Acct-Automation/ if the workflow build-out grows past a handful of tasks.

Staff (Phase 1)

• SVP-Accounting — AI agent, A1, modeled on SVP-Processes. Staff file: SVP-Accounting (drafted 2026-07-27 as Accounting-Director; renamed SVP-Accounting 2026-08-31).

UPGRADES (deferred)

• QBO API / CLI-Anything evaluation for automating postings (Phase 4 of founding plan) — parked until QBO migration + first manual HST cycle complete
• 20-CRM / broader-stack CLI-Anything exploration — explicitly parked, not in scope yet