Put Claude to Work · Workflow 5 of 6

Pull clean data out of messy paperwork

Somewhere in your business there's a stack of paper waiting to be typed into a spreadsheet. This workflow does the typing. Your job shrinks to checking its work.

From pile to table

Invoices, receipts, delivery slips, handwritten job tickets, emailed orders. The information is all there, it's just trapped in formats a spreadsheet can't eat. You already know from lesson 3 that Claude reads photos and attachments. This workflow adds the other half: telling it exactly which fields you want and what shape to return them in.

The safety rule from this module shows up here in its strictest form: a blank cell beats a guessed cell. A blank tells you to go look. A guess sits in your books looking exactly like a fact.

The workflow

Save this one, swap in your fields
Pull the following from each document below: {date, vendor, item, quantity, price}.

Give me one table with a row per document and those fields as columns, formatted so I can paste it into a spreadsheet.

Leave a cell blank if the document doesn't clearly say. Do not guess. After the table, list anything you weren't sure about.

THE DOCUMENTS:
{paste the text, or attach the photos and files}

The "list anything you weren't sure about" line is your review checklist. Check those items first, then spot-check a couple of rows against the originals.

All workflows in Put Claude to Work
  1. 1. Answer customer emails in your voice
  2. 2. Turn a rambling voice note into an SOP
  3. 3. Summarize any document or contract
  4. 4. Sort and triage anything
  5. 5. Pull clean data out of messy paperwork
  6. 6. Write proposals and quotes faster