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The CEO of a 30-staff apparel store company in Japan split payroll, shifts and filings into Claude "departments" on a $100 a month plan. He says a person still presses Submit.
The CEO of a Kansai apparel retailer with about 30 employees came back after seven years away to find payroll, attendance, transport expenses, shifts, social insurance, government filings, billing and payments all on his desk. He puts it at about 150 hours a month, nearly 50 of them on payroll. He moved from ChatGPT and Gemini to Claude on a $100 a month plan and, with no programming, asked Claude how to build the setup. He automated in this order: a fixed monthly payroll calculation that runs on a set morning, one morning report listing today's tasks and approaching deadlines, and a daily AI check for easy-to-miss items such as missed clock-ins. He split the work into AI "departments" (payroll and attendance, HR and labor, shifts, accounting, general affairs, recruitment, information management, tax and legal, PR), each with written rules on what it may touch. For example, only the payroll role can output amounts and only the shift role can correct records.
The author reports handing most of the company's admin to AI over about five months, and says the annual AI cost is far below the staff cost it replaces (his own wage-statistics estimate, not verified). He gives no measured hours saved. Two things went wrong: automatic checks passed three times while the screen layout was broken, so he added a human check by eye; and running 12 AIs at once made them cancel each other out for an hour, so output now runs once an hour. He says a person still verifies and presses Submit on money and government filings.
Self-reported by the CEO, who also sells a paid guide of prompts and checklists, so the savings figures are unverified. The page gives no hours saved after automation. Payroll and filings are legal duties: a person must review figures before anything is paid or submitted. Rules and laws are Japanese, so UK payroll and HMRC filings would need different checks.
Paste into ChatGPT, Claude or another AI assistant and fill in the square brackets.
You are the payroll checker for [business name], a [number]-person retail business. Using the attached [month] timesheets and the pay rules below, calculate each person's gross pay and list anything unusual: missed clock-ins, overtime above [number] hours, or changes from last month of more than [percent]. Pay rules: [paste rules]. Do not send, submit or change any record. Output a table of results plus a short list of items for me to check. I will review every figure before payment or filing.
Source: note.com · Oct 28, 2026. Summarised in our own words; read the original for the full account.
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