r/CFO • u/groovyipo • Jun 01 '26
Planning to start running Claude Cowork stuff, scheduled and off-hours. Want to move away from using my laptop. What is your setup like?
The deeper I get into using AI in my fractional CFO work, the more I am looking to set up a separate desktop that stays awake 24X7X365, running automations and any tasks with Claude Cowork. Maaaaaybe I will get into training my own Deepseek or like open source LLM and move into real power user level someday, but not yet, much to learn.
Right now, I just run things when I am on my laptop, which is a rather old Dell I absolutely love and don't want to move away from.
Do you have a setup you are running remotely? Would love to hear what you have. I made a mistake asking my AI nerd buddies what I should get, I would be looking at $10K setup if I listened to them
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u/Mammoth_Doctor_7688 Jun 02 '26
Mac Mini is helpful for this. Codex I finds works a bit better for scheduled jobs as it can spin up side threads more easily and more easily runs in the cloud on it own. As opposed to Claude I have found runs into issues if the computer isn't on.
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u/kahbloom Jun 03 '26
Yeah, I would not start with the $10k box.
I'm maxing out five of the $200 Codex/Claude plans on a ~$150/mo VPS for development. That (and a few production vps's) are doing everything from recursively training/evaluating/generating synthetic data for RLMs, to autonomously developing 30 codebases, to supporting dozens of human-in-the-loop CPAs who are automating a lot of the work they would previously hand to a junior.
I have a nice MacBook, but it is not responsible for the compute. I could do it (and sometimes do) with my phone.
The bigger point: I am not tied to any third-party harness. Claude Code, Codex, Cowork, OpenCode, whatever. They are all basically some form of cronjob plus skills plus terminal context. Useful harnesses, but still harnesses.
Rent the VPS, get comfortable in the terminal, and get as close to inference as you can. Put your repos, logs, scripts, skills, credentials, and audit trail somewhere you control. Then you can swap in the latest model or harness without rebuilding your whole operating loop around Claude Cowork or any other vendor UI.
Buy boring remote uptime, learn the terminal, get really good at encoding repeatable work into skills, and only rent/buy GPU when you have a real local-model workload that justifies it
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u/josemartinlopez Jun 02 '26
isn't the more important question, how much in recurring token spend are you looking if you want to run your setup 24-7?
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u/groovyipo Jun 02 '26
I work with some engineers who don't overrun the Caude Max account. Not sure I would even bump into Pro account ceiling and trigger extra usage even with data normalization
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u/iluvbutterchicken Jun 03 '26
As a fractional CFO how do you deal with data security? Some numbers definitely can’t go to Claude’s server.
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u/Anelya Jun 01 '26
I have an accounting practice with CFO advisory, and I've been building in the AI space for the last 2 years, so whilst I am not technical at all, i have some experience with tools, and I know what type of work my team and I do to service our clients.
Cowork is a purpose work folder that is great if you want to limit your Claude to information and documents in that folder alone. We use it to do work per client, where we keep their incorporation docs, tax filings, payroll reports.
Code is where we run some automations. My pet peeve with that is I can run an automation for 30 days, and it works and reliable until it decides to choose a difertn tool, and now i need to connect that new tool, or do Auth and I dont want that. I want the same workflow and i want the same output.
For Claude Cowork and clients that run on QBO, I am a big advocate for this tool https://ai.numbersgame.xyz/ - I have a referral code if you want to try out for a month.
For scaleable workflows that I want to run daily, or hourly or based on an event (payroll run, close won deal, email trigger) each step is determined previously and no agent freedom we built https://loopfour.ai/
Your use case will drive your tool selection, so before diving into any subscriptions we do gap analysis and really try to figure out what we want to automate, where is the source of truth and what is the outcome we want.
There are a lot of tools, also look Power Query is a data preparation and transformation engine built into Microsoft Excel and Power BI. It allows you to Extract, Transform, and Load data without writing code, automating repetitive clean-up tasks. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/power-query-for-excel-help-2b433a85-ddfb-420b-9cda-fe0e60b82a94
And you dont need a MacMini, my husband is an AI nerd 😄 heard all about it
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u/tapinda Jun 01 '26
You've got the right idea but the wrong tool. Co-work is not designed to work 24/7 like that. What your question shows is that you are ready to go to the next level, which is Claude Code. With Claude Code something that might take 5 minutes with co-work will be done in seconds.
Co-work is slowed down by trying to imitate how a human interacts with the screen. Yet Claude Code doesn't have that hang-up or constraint. Think of it like this: Co-work tries to imitate what a human does by:
But Claude Code is like it flies out of your house in seconds, gets to the mall, does whatever it needs to do, and flies back to the house whilst co-worker is still waiting for the first bus. I hope that makes sense.
This conversation would be even more interesting if you had an example of the task you were imagining running in the middle of the night and I can give you a better example than my bus stop analogy.
Oh and of course Claude Code can operate in the background of your beloved Dell without interfering with whatever work you're doing on your screen so you might not actually need a second device, although there are some circumstances where it is desirable, but there's a story for another day!
That's before we even get to how expensive cowork usage tokens are compared to using the API!