Scale & Strategy
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This is Scale & Strategy, the hydraulic press of business newsletters (we pack everything you need to know into an easy daily read).
Here’s what we got for you today:
- Use Claude to clean up your business finances
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Use Claude to clean up your business finances
Here’s a quick walkthrough on turning your messy finance folders into a clean, usable dashboard with Claude. No accountant. No twelve-tab spreadsheet nightmare. Just a simple workflow that gives you a numbers snapshot you can actually use.
Step-by-step:
- Open Claude, sign in, pick Sonnet 4.5, and turn on extended thinking and web search.
- Upload your files: revenue, invoices, expenses, inventory, whatever you’ve got scattered around. Then tell Claude exactly what you want: your goal, the file types, how you want everything organized, and the vibe or layout you prefer.
- Claude spits out a dashboard with revenue, expenses, profit, plus clean pie charts, bar charts, and summaries. Edit in plain English if something looks off or you want it rearranged.
- Add upgrades like “Add a column that shows days since each invoice” or “Highlight any expense category trending up month-over-month.” When it’s right, publish and share the artifact link.
Pro Tip: This is clutch for small teams. You get instant clarity on what’s working, what’s leaking cash, and what needs to be tightened up without waiting on a bookkeeper.
Vanta uses AI and automation to get you compliant fast, simplify your audit process, and unblock deals — so you can prove to customers that you take security seriously.
Make Vanta your compliance co-pilot and:
- Get SOC 2 ready without pulling engineers off product
- Automate evidence collection and streamline audit processes
- Unblock enterprise deals with security credibility that sales
- Access expert support at every stage, from startup to scale-up
Get compliant fast with Vanta – trusted by top startups like Cursor, Linear, and Replit.
Phase out these Google Ads tactics in 2026
Some PPC habits are basically fossils at this point. Here’s what needs to get retired next year, per Sarah Vlietstra:
- Phrase match keywords are done.
They used to be the middle ground between exact and broad. Now they’re just the awkward middle child no one needs. Broad match is smarter, exact match is tighter, and phrase match can’t keep up with either.
- Don’t sleep on Standard Shopping.
Google keeps shoving Performance Max in everyone’s face, but Standard Shopping is still a weapon, especially after the 2024 ad rank shift. You get more control, cleaner attribution, product-level insights, and better brand protection.
- Stop using GA4 as your primary conversion signal.
Google Ads needs real-time, native signals for Smart Bidding to actually do its job. GA4 events lag, track differently, and just aren’t reliable enough to be your main conversion metric.
- Keep Performance Max away from your branded terms.
PMax hoards branded queries to juice ROAS and hide the fact it’s not driving true incremental lift. Breaking branded out into its own campaign gives you cleaner data. That said, some accounts perform better leaving them inside PMax, depending on history and budget.
- Don’t over-pin your RSAs.
Fewer assets, smarter pinning. Give Google enough flexibility to test, but don’t let it freestyle your entire message. And Ad Strength? Treat it like a suggestion, not a scoreboard. Chasing “Excellent” can tank performance.
The 2026 mindset: stop fighting automation and start feeding it better inputs. That’s where the real leverage is.
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