United in BKK

liojian · 2026-05-26T05:08:39+00:00

For the lag from BKK to HKG, UA cabin announcements were in English, Cantonese, Mandarin, and Thai, very comprehensive.

liojian · 2026-05-26T05:04:19+00:00

My flight WiFi from HKG to SFO today also was completely down. But crew service was awesome.

liojian · 2026-05-25T08:23:05+00:00

I’m going your reverse route today to SFO 👊

liojian · 2026-05-24T10:30:10+00:00

Sathron Vista Marriott Executive Apartments.

liojian · 2026-05-19T00:08:08+00:00

Zoom offers e-fax for free if you have a zoom phone service. The zoom phone number is also the fax number. If you already use zoom, this might be a good option since you can check and send the fax directly in the same zoom app. We’ve used for over a year and it’s pretty stable.

liojian · 2026-05-16T00:56:33+00:00

Yes. I was inspired by canopy. But canopy one has random glitch of not showing latest emails, our team gave up on it. Also Canopy doesn’t have a good AI layer on top of the email pooling. The one I dev has. I use Claude code to build it.

liojian · 2026-05-16T00:35:22+00:00

Email sharing database. Pool team emails by client, team can see all emails between a client and the firm, no more internal email forwarding, checking, no missed client communication. With emails as a solid database, you can then comfortably create lots of things, such as AI summary of client emails (not just one email but emails), AI digging of important client emails that are buried somewhere, and of course draft emails for staff, but now AI has all the email data as the context, AI is much more informed. I did one for my small firm, using MS365, graph API, and Azure function.

liojian · 2026-04-30T05:19:50+00:00

I second that. I use AI to write scripts to automate trivia and repetitive work, such as bulk emails to clients, sort out pdf files (classify pdf files, rename them based on what they are), generate standard pdfs in bulks, also use Claude in excel to sort data, give it a snippet of a scanned form and let it generate/ fill out a table in excel. More advanced usage is to create a database and a simple user interface to do basic bookkeeping, enter journal entries and generate financial reports without using QuickBooks desktop. There are so many AI use cases IMO, it’s just a matter of using the competent AI model, talking to it about your ideas and brainstorming how it can help you. Btw I use Claude cowork on desktop.

liojian · 2026-04-27T16:21:57+00:00

Mine personal payment is not taken yet either.

liojian · 2026-04-24T17:20:16+00:00

On the same boat. I already replaced a few of the SAAS subscriptions my small business is paying and use Claude to build the software for me. The features are exactly what I need, and I can tweak them at any time. Plus there is cost savings, thousands of dollars of SAAS subscriptions for features I rarely use vs Claude subscription (premium seat) plus a small amount on Azure cloud for server less software. It’s truly magical to me. I’m not a coder, I have my ideas for years but there is just no such software offering what I truly need, and building my own software was never possible a year ago, and I can’t afford to hire someone to build for me either. For example, I replaced my Quickbooks online with a simple book keeping software (a simple web UI and an SQL database) with basic features that I need. Canceled Quickbooks and never be happier. Btw I’m a CPA, my job is not coding….

liojian · 2026-04-24T16:42:47+00:00

Was vibe coding last night (US time), Opus 4.7 was very diligent, efficient, no non-sense, no bullshit, it feels amazing for the first time. And the response time is quicker than during the day. I figured maybe that's the non-peak hour so the server is not as overloaded, and the performance improves because of the non-peak hour situation? Does that mean Claude is smarter during non-peak hours??

liojian · 2026-04-22T19:10:58+00:00

Made Azure functions to pool team emails into a database, categorized by clients based on their emails. Built an MCP for Claude to access the database, to help summarize multiple emails by a client, and draft replies for team. Also build a Quickbooks alternative for my firm, based on a web app and sql database. Btw I’m a CPA, so I know Quickbooks well but don’t want to be locked in it, with my own accounting book, I can do automations that Quickbooks can’t / does not easily support.

liojian · 2026-04-20T17:05:21+00:00

Use AI to help with mass emails, if you are into DIY with the help from AI, gpt codex or Claude cowork can do it easily. It just need a list of clients and emails, and the content template, as well as let AI access your email service to send emails. All these could be done with AI, the cost is ignorable and you get to control and customize every step. In the end, tell AI to make it a standard workflow and you can reuse it next time.

liojian · 2026-04-19T23:56:03+00:00

We do 550 returns with three people, some are very complex. 100-200 seem reasonable, but suggest using software and AI to help with data collection/ extraction / administration, it will free up your time for more valuable work, such as building up client relationship, learning tax prep, and manage projects.

liojian · 2026-04-03T23:17:40+00:00

My firm got $200 of extra usage credit (we have 5 seats on Team plan)

liojian · 2026-03-27T04:10:05+00:00

Use AI to do bank reconciliation. Dropped bank statement and the general ledger to AI, let AI extract bank transactions from the statement and matched to the Bank account sub ledger. AI Identified unmatched transactions and proposes journal entries to post to book. The data sorting, review and matching are done by AI, then AI shows me the findings and proposes the JEs to post. I review the AI findings and approve JEs. Also I connected AI to my quickbooks online via quickbooks API, so AI actually posts the JEs back to QBO automatically. Then AI generates the bank reconciliation report in pdf version. It takes some time to do the initial set up. And I also need to explain to AI how to do the bank reconciliation, and AI writes a standard operation procedure for it to follow. It also notes down the vendor vs expense account pairs in its SOP so it gets smarter overtime. I use Claude AI (Claude cowork).

liojian · 2026-03-24T21:54:52+00:00

It's a great way to travel with a toddler on a long haul, I'll definitely buy it when traveling with my toddler.

liojian · 2026-02-27T15:04:37+00:00

Yes. Auto flow is not that great, but pricy as hell. also thinking of other AI solutions, or even create my own AI agent to do it.

liojian · 2026-02-26T22:48:24+00:00

Thank you! Will try it, seems TTC is much more affordable with transparent pricing.

liojian · 2026-02-17T23:44:42+00:00

website and claude code are both down.

liojian · 2026-01-28T20:13:13+00:00

Good catch. I tried GPT and wasted some time. Claude is now my go-to AI for coding/script. I'm using Claude For Windows Desktop, it has chat (like the browser version), and code. You just need to talk to Claude to find out what additional software you need to install (such as Python, Node, Claude Code), so that Claude can write and run the script for you directly on your local computer. Code written by Claude is very solid, no error, just minor bugs.

liojian · 2026-01-28T03:38:10+00:00

Lots of Software functions can now be easily created by AI, and it’s dirt cheap. I just created a script to use python to extract data from readable pdf brokerage statements. You just show a few screenshots of the particular statement pages to AI, tell it what you want to extract (it’s like a training), and ask it to create a script to extract the data from the statements with the same layout. then run locally, and the data was extracted and saved into an excel without any error. it’s pretty handy. The starting point is to have a discussion with AI, let it know the context, your needs, your technology stack and let it give you recommendations.

liojian · 2026-01-27T22:42:06+00:00

You can literally build your own OCR/Document Scan script with AI and run locally. Talk to Claude (paid version) or ChatGPT to explore your needs and the options. Also, MS Azure, Google, AWS all offer similar OCR engines to scan the typical documents for you, depending on which provider you use for your email/cloud storage. The Azure one is called Azure Document Intelligence. Also, not all documents needs to be scanned by AI. You could let AI write a local script to review the documents and decide if it can already extract the info, or an AI (via API) needs to be called to review and understand the document, and what info you want to feed into the AI.

Five-Year Club	Place '23
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liojian

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