An opinionated workflow showcasing how I used Claude and Obsidian together to help with my personal tax filing in Canada

Just make sure you never let claude make do any calculation without using a programming language. It can be somewhat trusted to make less mistakes than a human when it comes to filling in the right numbers but it's still not great at math.

I bought a copy of Office this year to do my taxes with the excel1040.com template and Claude for Excel, and dropped my 1099s and stuff into the chat window and Claude just transferred the numbers to the correct cells and Excel did the calculations. It was super easy (also easy to check because my tax picture didn’t change much from last year). It got some things right that TurboTax always got wrong (like cost basis for ESPPs). The only part that was difficult was getting Claude to transfer the data to the IRS fillable PDFs - I probably spent longer iterating on that than it would have taken to copy-paste the data from Excel. Other than that, it worked great, highly recommend.