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Hermes Agent For Accounting: A Books Profile And Five Copy-Paste Prompts In Your Agent OS

By Julian Goldie · 8 November 2026 · agentos.guide

Hermes Agent for accounting fits neatly into your Agent OS as a separate bookkeeping profile: you paste five prompts, it builds the intake, the house rules, the payment summary and the month-end pack, and a person signs off every figure.

Below is a quick start, the five prompts to give your agent, and a weekly rhythm that keeps it tidy.

Every feature is taken from the official Hermes Agent docs at v0.23.0, and none of it is tax or financial advice.

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Quick Start: The Books Profile First

1. Create a separate profile with hermes profile create books; the profiles docs give it its own settings, keys, memory, skills and cron jobs.
2. Pick a model; the providers page recommends local Ollama for privacy-sensitive and offline work.
3. Create a fresh mailbox for receipts and connect it with the email gateway, listing only your staff in EMAIL_ALLOWED_USERS.
4. Make three folders: exports/ for files you download, prep/ for the agent's work and prep/drafts/ for emails.
5. Run everything below inside the books profile, never your main one.

That's the whole foundation, and it keeps finance logins away from the rest of your Agent OS.

A practice with several clients can repeat the same steps once per client, so each client's files, notes and schedule live in their own profile.

The docs warn against running two agents on one profile, which makes that one-per-client layout the tidy choice anyway.

Three Settings To Check Before You Paste Anything

• The sender pin: the email gateway needs EMAIL_AUTHSERV_ID (for Gmail, mx.google.com), or it drops every message that needs an authenticated sender.
• The approval mode: leave approvals.mode on its default of smart, which asks before dangerous shell commands.
• Checkpoints: they are opt-in, so add checkpoints: enabled: true to snapshot files before destructive operations and allow a /rollback.

Each of those is documented on the security page or the email and checkpoints guides, so set all three before the first document arrives.

Prompt 1: Build The Receipts Intake

Paste this into the books profile once the mailbox works.

Set up my receipts intake.
When a new email arrives with a PDF or photo attached:
1. Save the file to prep/inbox/ as YYYY-MM-DD_supplier_docnumber.
2. Add one row to prep/intake.xlsx: date, supplier, doc number, file name.
3. Copy figures exactly as printed. If anything is unclear, write UNSURE.
4. If a PDF page has no readable text, list the page numbers as SCANNED.
5. Reply to the sender with one line confirming the file name. Nothing else.
Never edit anything in exports/.

Point 4 matters because PDF conversion reads the text layer only, and the docs' coverage warning flags empty scanned pages so you can fix them.

Remember the gateway ignores noreply-style senders, so suppliers' automatic invoices need forwarding by a person.

What you get back is a folder of consistently named files and a workbook with one line per document, which is already more than most small firms have at month end.

Test it with ten real documents from last month before you rely on it, and compare every row with the original by hand.

Prompt 2: Write The House-Rules Skill

Skills sit in ~/.hermes/skills/ and load whenever a job needs them, per the skills docs.

Create a skill called books-house-rules from what we agreed in Prompt 1.
Add these rules:
- Draft only. Never send an email to a client or supplier.
- Never pay, refund, delete or post anything.
- Work on copies in prep/. Never change files in exports/.
- Every figure you write must say which file and page it came from.
Show me the SKILL.md before you save it.

Then set skills.write_approval: true in the profile's config, so any later change to those rules waits for your approval.

The bundled microsoft-office skill pairs well with it, since it creates and edits Excel and CSV files offline.

The last line of the prompt is deliberate: reading the skill before it is saved is how you catch a rule the agent misunderstood.

🔥 Get the bookkeeping prompts as a ready-made pack

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Prompt 3: Connect Stripe, Square Or PayPal Read-Only

All three sit in the Nous-approved MCP catalog as vendor-hosted servers that sign in over OAuth.

Add the Stripe server from the MCP catalog to this profile.
In its config, set trust: untrusted
and exclude these tools: delete_customer, refund_payment.
Then list every tool you can see and mark which ones are read-only.
Do not run any tool that changes data.

The MCP config reference explains why: on an untrusted server, every write-capable call stops for your approval first.

Never switch on YOLO or approvals.mode: off in this profile, as both skip that prompt.

Swap Stripe for Square or PayPal if that's what your till or shop runs on.

Skip the Plaid entry for this: its manifest describes the Plaid developer dashboard, not a feed of bank transactions.

Bank statements still come in as files you download yourself into exports/.

Prompt 4: The Weekly Prep Job

Create a cron job for every Monday at 8am, using the books-house-rules skill.
It should:
1. Summarise last week's payments from Stripe by day.
2. List any rows in prep/intake.xlsx still marked UNSURE or SCANNED.
3. Email the summary to me. Draft only for anything addressed to a client.
Pin this job to the current model.

The cron docs let jobs load skills and pin a model, and the agent can create the job itself from plain language.

Scheduled runs refuse dangerous commands by default, thanks to cron_mode: deny, so leave that setting alone.

Pinning matters more than it looks: without a pin, a job runs on whatever main model you have set at the moment it fires, so swapping models for a chat would quietly change your Monday report.

If the summary ever looks wrong, pause the job, fix the skill, and run it again by hand before you resume it.

Prompt 5: The Month-End Pack And Chase-Up Drafts

Create a cron job for 9am on the 1st of each month, using books-house-rules.
Build prep/month-end/YYYY-MM/ with:
- the intake list for last month,
- payments with no matching document,
- documents with no matching payment,
- a draft email to each person who owes a receipt, saved in prep/drafts/.
Draft only. Do not send anything. Tell me when the pack is ready.

Hermes approvals cover risky commands, not outgoing mail, so the words "draft only" do the real work here.

Your bookkeeper opens the folder, checks it against the originals and does the posting in your accounting software.

The bundled email-inbox-triage skill takes the same stance, defaulting to reading and drafting rather than sending or deleting.

Read each draft before it goes, because a reminder about money sent to the wrong person is hard to take back.

What The Agent Prepares, And What You Decide

Keep that right-hand column human, and the set-up stays safe.

The agent is very good at the middle column: collecting, naming, listing and summarising without getting bored.

It has no business in the right-hand column, because coding, posting and tax treatment need a qualified person who knows the client.

Worked Example: A Sole-Trader Electrician On Stripe

1. Supplier receipts arrive as PDFs and phone photos, all forwarded to the receipts mailbox.
2. Prompt 1 files them and flags two blurred photos as UNSURE.
3. The Monday job lists last week's Stripe card payments and the open UNSURE rows.
4. On the 1st, the pack shows three customer payments with no matching job sheet.
5. The electrician checks those three, and the accountant gets a clean folder.

Nothing in that flow pays, posts or sends, and every step leaves a file a person can open and check.

The house-rules skill grows a little each month as the electrician notes which suppliers' receipts the agent misread.

There's no QuickBooks or Xero connection in the Hermes catalogs, so the exports go across by hand.

If you want to compare a hosted route, see our Grok Bot for accounting guide.

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The Weekly Rhythm

• Daily: staff forward receipts; the agent files them and replies with the file name.
• Monday: read the payment summary and clear the UNSURE rows.
• The 1st: open the month-end pack, check it, send the drafts you agree with.
• Each month: add every correction you made to the house-rules skill.

Inside the AI Profit Boardroom you can bring your pack to a coaching call and get it reviewed.

FAQ

Do I need a separate profile for bookkeeping?

It is the safest set-up. A Hermes profile has its own settings, keys, memory, skills and cron jobs, so finance logins stay apart from your other agents.

Can the agent send the chase-up emails itself?

Hermes has no documented approval step for outgoing mail, so the prompts say draft only and save emails to a folder for a person to send.

Which payment apps can it read?

Stripe, Square and PayPal have vendor-hosted entries in the Nous-approved MCP catalog. Connect them as untrusted, with refund and delete tools excluded.

What happens with scanned receipts?

PDF conversion reads text layers only, so image-only pages come back empty. The prompts flag them as SCANNED so a person or an OCR step can fill the gap.

Final word on Hermes Agent For Accounting

Paste Prompt 1 into your books profile today, and book a free strategy session or join the AI Profit Boardroom if you want help with the rest of your Hermes Agent for accounting set-up.

Related guides on agentos.guide

→ Hermes Agent For Business: Start With One Job, Then Grow It With Five Copy-Paste Prompts In Your Agent OS

→ Hermes Agent Cron Job: Schedule, Stop And Recover Jobs In Your Agent OS With 5 Copy-Paste Prompts

→ Hermes Agent For Ecommerce: 5 Shop Prompts In Your Agent OS

→ Hermes vs Manus: Give Each Agent Its Job In Your Agent OS

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