Your first AI agent: a Monday invoice briefing that prepares itself

By the end of this guide, an AI agent checks your supplier invoices every Monday morning before you arrive. It reads the PDFs in one OneDrive folder and lists each invoice in a table: supplier, number, dates, amount, VAT and payment reference. It flags what is due this week and anything odd, such as changed bank details. You open one table instead of twenty PDFs.

The agent only reads and prepares. It pays nothing. A person still checks the table and releases payments in e-banking.

We use Claude with its Cowork scheduled tasks and the Microsoft 365 connector, because Anthropic documents every screen of this setup in its help centre. A ChatGPT version is at the end.

What you need

• A paid Claude plan. Pro costs USD 20 a month, or USD 17 a month billed yearly (about CHF 17 or CHF 14). Team costs USD 25 a seat a month, or USD 20 billed yearly (about CHF 21 or CHF 17), for 2 to 150 people. Prices exclude tax (Claude pricing). Scheduled tasks work on Pro, Max, Team and Enterprise (Claude Help).
• A Microsoft 365 business account with OneDrive. Personal accounts (@outlook.com, @hotmail.com, @live.com) can’t be connected (Claude Help).
• Your Microsoft 365 admin for ten minutes. Someone with the Global Administrator role must approve the connector once for your company.
• A OneDrive folder for invoices, for example Accounts/Incoming invoices.
• Time: about 60 minutes the first time, including a test run.
• Skills: no technical skills needed.

Step 1: Set up the invoice folder (10 minutes)

Create the folder Accounts/Incoming invoices in OneDrive. Agree one habit with whoever opens the accounts inbox: every supplier invoice PDF is saved into this folder the day it arrives, either from the attachment’s menu in Outlook or by dragging it into the folder.

Why not read the emails directly? Anthropic’s help pages don’t say whether Claude can open PDF attachments in Outlook. They do confirm it reads PDFs stored in OneDrive and SharePoint. Your bookkeeper will like one invoice folder anyway.