Brian Carey Phoenix, Arizona 23H AGO

How I Use AI: Building a Client's Entire Document System From Scratch I run a boutique accounting practice, and one of my biotech clients — a preclinical oncology company — needed something I didn't have time to build by hand: a real, standardized document management system in SharePoint. Not just folders, but the rules behind the folders — a tagging taxonomy, a naming standard, guides for the team to actually follow it, and a clean way to organize documents for every vendor we work with. The kind of project that's easy to keep putting off because it's tedious, not because it's hard. So I used Perplexity's Computer agent as a genuine working partner on it, not just a search tool. Where it started I already had a first draft of a Tagging Taxonomy and a Document Management Standards document. I asked Computer to review both with an eye toward what a real accounting/finance team would actually need — GAAP-heavy, audit-ready, built for a lean biotech team that's going to scale fast. It came back with concrete recommendations (new functional areas I hadn't accounted for, cleaner naming conventions), and once I gave the go-ahead, it revised both documents into new, cleaner versions — taxonomy v1.1, standards v5.4 — complete with version histories so nothing got lost in the shuffle. Then it went further than I expected: 13 "START HERE" guide files, one for every top-level folder area, each explaining not just what goes where but why, with real examples. That's the part that actually makes a standard stick — nobody follows a rulebook they don't understand. Where it got real Here's the part I'd actually tell someone about: I tried uploading the whole folder structure to the client's SharePoint through the browser, and it failed — quietly, no big error, just close to 100 folders silently missing afterward. I was frustrated, and I said so. Computer didn't get defensive about it — it dug into why, compared the folders that made it against the ones that didn't, found the exact character-length boundary where things broke, and built me a PowerShell script that would fix it if I needed it. Then, while I was testing a fix, I discovered the real answer myself: dragging the folder from my hard drive straight into the OneDrive-linked folder in File Explorer worked perfectly, no script needed at all. When I told Computer that, it didn't just take my word for it — it went and calculated the actual path lengths involved to confirm why that method worked and the browser upload didn't, so I understood the real mechanism instead of just getting lucky once. That back-and-forth — me testing in the real world, it verifying the "why" — is honestly the most useful part of working with it. It's not just generating stuff and hoping it's right. The vendor folder win The last piece was the most tedious one I was dreading: building a dedicated document folder — vendor master file, agreements, POs, invoices, correspondence, the works — for every vendor worth tracking. I pulled a vendor spend report out of QuickBooks, sorted by dollar volume, and picked out the real vendors (CROs, law firms, key consultants) versus the noise (hotels, gas stations, one-off restaurant charges). I handed that list over, and Computer built me a script that took it from there: cleaned up messy vendor names (ampersands, apostrophes, trailing punctuation — all the stuff that breaks Windows folder names), handled the one legal name that was way too long automatically, and made sure nothing silently failed the way the original upload did. It tested the script against my actual vendor list before ever handing it to me, so I wasn't the guinea pig for its own bugs. 133 vendors, 1,463 subfolders, dropped into staging, dragged to OneDrive, and the count matched exactly — 1,474 on the nose once you add back the original template folder. That's not a "looks about right" number. That's a number I checked, twice. Why it's worth it Building this by hand for BreakthruMed Inc. — the folder architecture, the governance docs, 13 training guides, and a dedicated set of folders for 133 vendors — would realistically have taken me a couple of weeks of solid, focused work, not the few days I first assumed. Instead, it took about 28 hours spread across three weeks of back-and-forth, testing, and real-world validation, plus roughly $200 in extra usage on top of my regular subscription. That's a real cost, but a small one next to two or three weeks of my own time — and what I walked away with wasn't just a folder tree. It was a governance framework, training material my team can actually use, and two reusable scripts I'll put to work on the next client — a system I trust, because I checked it, and it checked itself