v0.4.0: Answer from your phone

Answer from your phone

A close runs across days, and the handful of times it needs you are scattered through them. Being tied to your desk for a one-line answer was the wrong trade, so Clerk.AI now has an iPhone companion.

The questions reach your phone with a notification, so you're not checking the Mac to find out whether anything is waiting. You answer by holding a button and speaking, the way you'd answer a colleague. The clip syncs to your Mac and is transcribed there, on your own hardware — and you watch the transcription happen live on the phone rather than staring at "Queued".

The screen you land on is the status screen, not an empty inbox, because "nothing needs you" is the state you'll open it in most of the time. It tells you what the close is doing and when it last moved, so you can tell the difference between working, waiting on you, and stuck — which is the only question anyone actually opens it to ask.

And "needs your Mac" is its own state. Strong authentication genuinely cannot happen on a phone: your bank wants you, on the machine, approving it. Rather than failing quietly the companion says so, says nothing else is blocked, and offers you the questions you can answer from where you are.

Sync runs through your own iCloud, between your Mac and your own phone. The companion is one of the things a €5 licence adds.

You decide what it costs

Pricing changed underneath this release, and it's simpler than what it replaces. There's one product at one price you choose — move a slider, buy a licence for that amount. There is no Premium tier, no trial, and no feature that decides whether the app closes your books. It closes them at every amount, including zero.

Free is the whole app, unlimited periods, forever. What your amount changes is whether this keeps being built — and a few extras listed openly beside the slider, of which the iPhone companion is the first.

Whatever your amount includes on the day you subscribe stays included, even if we publish different numbers later. That's not a promise we're asking you to trust: what you bought is recorded against the purchase itself, so a future price list can't quietly take something away.

Your licence, on this Mac

Until this release, buying a licence changed nothing you could see in the app. That was the wrong way round. Settings → Account now signs you in with an emailed code, or with Apple, GitHub or Google — the same four ways this site offers, and the same account either way.

"What your amount includes" shows what you actually bought, read from the licence rather than guessed at locally: a €5 licence shows two ticks and four empty circles, not six ticks it has no right to. Signing in adds what you paid for and takes nothing away if you never do — onboarding mentions it once, at the very end, and "Finish" is there either way.

The handover

The last ten minutes of a close is where it either saves you an evening or doesn't, and it was the least finished part of the app.

The email review is now a two-pane sheet — the draft on one side, the actions on the other, so nothing you need sits below the fold, and you can revise without leaving it. The attachments are a real list you can preview, with a button that opens the staged folder in Finder with the files already selected, ready to drag wherever your accountant actually wants them. You can copy the recipient, the subject, or the body on its own — and bold stays bold when you paste it, instead of arriving as literal underscores.

A close also no longer ends at "drafted", which was never where a month ends. The period moves through review, sent, and done, and you say when. Only you can close a period — the app will not mark your books closed on your behalf, and the button that certifies it now looks like the deliberate act it is.

The ledger, and what's behind each row

The ledger lists money movements, and supporting documents now attach to them rather than appearing as extra rows — which previously meant a receipt could be counted twice. You can open a receipt straight from the transaction it belongs to. "Unmatched" names the missing side, so you know whether you're short a document or short a transaction. And a statement line on its own is no longer quietly booked as its own proof, which is exactly the kind of thing your accountant would have caught later, at your expense.

Duplicate transactions are flagged when they're written rather than discovered afterwards. And the period-close copy dropped its jargon — no more "verifikat", no more "money movement".

A closed period that admits what it missed

The screen you land on after closing a month was rebuilt in the order that makes it honest: what it did, what it couldn't do, and what your accountant said. Four figures rather than four paragraphs — items collected, questions it had to put to you, and the receipts it found in your photos, which is the most interesting thing this product can say about itself. Every figure opens the rows behind it.

The misses block never disappears. When there's nothing in it, it says so. That's the only reason the rest of the screen is believable — a close that reports only its wins is one you have to check by hand anyway.

Your accountant's replies now read as a conversation, dated, with each side tinted. That exchange has been sitting in your files all along and the app had never once shown it, which is odd given it's the part no export tool does.

Try it on someone else's books first

There is an obvious objection to this product, and it isn't the price. You're being asked to let software drive a browser that's signed into your bank. No paragraph fixes that; watching it work might.

Settings → Identities → Demo vault downloads a fictional company — Alex Carter — and opens it in its own vault, in its own window, entirely separate from yours. Photos, receipts, dates, places, people: all fixture data, none of it real. You can run a whole close on books that aren't yours, see what it collects and what it asks, and decide afterwards whether you want it anywhere near your own.

The separation is structural rather than a promise. A demo is a genuinely separate vault with its own index and its own background process; it never syncs to iCloud, and it never touches your Photos library or your voice memos. It's downloaded when you ask for it rather than shipped inside the app.

A redesign, and where it starts

Clerk.AI has a visual system now — shared type, colour and shapes, drawn against the same values this site serves, so the app and the website are one brand rather than two that resemble each other. Instrument Serif, Public Sans and IBM Plex Mono, with every text-on-background pair checked against WCAG AA contrast, which is less glamorous than a palette and more likely to matter at eleven at night.

The closed-period screen and the first run are its first adopters, and the rest of the app follows from here. The sidebar went with it: there was one place to be, and a navigation column insisting otherwise.

First run, rebuilt

The old flow disclosed its requirements one screen at a time. Tools named three things; two screens later, Verify added Node, a browser tool and a 1.5 GB model download nobody had mentioned. If you were on hotel wifi the night before a deadline, you found out about the 1.5 GB on step four.

Four steps now, with the whole inventory stated before you start any of it. One pasted line installs everything, and its failure state names what's still missing and how to reach a person rather than offering a bare "Re-check". You get asked the one question that genuinely branches — how the AI gets paid for — which the old flow never asked, so everyone walked the long way round. Each system permission prompt gets its reason before it fires.

The last step proves it works: the checks run themselves, in dependency order, and report how long each took. The speaking check is the one you perform yourself — hold the button, say anything, read your own words back. It's the control you'll use most, and hearing it work is worth more than being told it does.

Smaller things worth knowing

A run that hits a Claude usage limit now waits and resumes itself when the limit resets, and tells you that's what it's doing. It used to look identical to working, for hours. Home says what's waiting on you and how long it's been waiting.

Push-to-talk works on every note field now, not just the answer sheet. You can report a bug by speaking it in Settings → Support, which is faster than typing one-handed while a run is stuck and tends to include the detail we need. Model downloads resume, verify themselves, and time out instead of hanging. Clerk.AI also has its own typefaces and palette now — the same values this site serves — with every text-on-background pair checked against WCAG AA contrast.

What this still asks of you

It's a Mac app, it needs Claude Code and your own Anthropic subscription, and the first run involves a terminal. That last one is the honest weak point — much better than it was, and not finished.

It drives a Chrome profile of its own, which you sign into yourself, rather than the browser you browse in. Your everyday tabs and sessions are never involved. That's why it works with banks and portals nobody has integrated with, and it's the part worth understanding before you point it at anything.

The author has closed his own books this way for nine months — the last two with the app, and the seven before that driving Claude Code by hand, one prompt at a time, because the app didn't exist yet. Most of what's in this release is something he got tired of doing manually. If it gets something wrong about how your books work, we'd genuinely like to hear it.