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Zeno has no scheduler that reaches into your ledger. That is a deliberate limit, not a missing feature: nothing posts to your books without a person reading a plan first, and a robot that logs in overnight to click Approve is the one thing that would quietly undo that promise. What you can schedule is the preparation. The coding, the matching, the reconciliation drafts, the questions that need a human — all of it can be waiting for you when you sit down, with the approval still yours. The scheduler lives in your assistant, not in Zeno. Both Claude and ChatGPT can run a saved prompt on a timer against their connected tools, and Zeno is one of those tools.

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Set up the scheduled work

1

Write the procedure down as a playbook

A playbook is the repeatable part: the order things happen in, the accounts that need checking, what to leave alone. Save it with qb_write_playbook, then confirm it with qb_confirm_playbook — an unconfirmed playbook is a draft, and qb_run_playbook will refuse it unless you ask for a rehearsal.Keep it firm-wide unless a client genuinely differs. A practice runs one month-end close, not seventeen.
2

Make the scheduled prompt short

The scheduled prompt should not contain the procedure. It should name it:
This matters more than it looks. A long scheduled prompt drifts from what your playbook says and you end up maintaining two procedures. A short one always runs the current version.
3

Let it stop at the plan

qb_plan_batch writes nothing to QuickBooks. It resolves names and accounts, applies your coding rules, flags duplicates, and leaves a table in the review journal. That table is what you read in the morning; qb_apply_batch is what you run after you have read it.

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Setting it up in Claude

Claude calls the feature scheduled tasks. It is available in Claude Cowork on all paid plans (Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise), and it runs on an hourly, daily, weekly, weekday, or manual cadence. Scheduled tasks have the same access as your ordinary chats, including connectors — so a scheduled task can reach the Zeno connector exactly the way you do when you type. Confirm the connector is enabled for the scheduled task before relying on it.
Claude Code users have a second option: routines, which run scheduled agents in the cloud rather than in the chat app. That suits a practice that wants the run to happen whether or not anyone’s laptop is open.

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Setting it up in ChatGPT

ChatGPT calls it scheduled tasks too, reached from the Scheduled page in the sidebar, where you can see the next run time and pause, edit, or delete each one. How many you can have at once depends on your plan — roughly three on the free and entry tiers, more on Pro and Enterprise. Two caveats worth knowing before you build a practice around it:
  • MCP connector support is uneven. Full read/write MCP connectors are a Business, Enterprise, and Edu capability; on Plus and Pro you connect servers through developer mode with tighter limits on what a tool is allowed to do. Confirm your plan reaches Zeno’s write tools before you schedule work that depends on them.
  • A connector available in chat is not guaranteed inside a scheduled run. Users report scheduled tasks reporting a connector unavailable that works fine when prompted live.
Neither is a reason to avoid ChatGPT. Both are a reason to watch the first week of runs before you trust the eighth.

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What to schedule

Daily, early

Sync the mirror, pull the feed, and plan the coding for anything the rules already cover. You arrive to a table, not a queue.

Weekly

Unmatched receipts, aging that moved, bills approaching their due date, and anything sitting in Ask My Accountant.

Month-end

Run the close playbook to the point of the plan. The entries wait for you.

After a cleanup

Re-run qb_study_history so the drafted knowledge reflects the books as they now are, not as they were.

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What not to schedule

Do not schedule qb_apply_batch, and do not write a scheduled prompt that tells Zeno to approve its own plan. You can phrase such a prompt, and it will do as it is told — the tools obey you, including when you are wrong. The reason not to is not that the coding will be bad. It is usually good. The reason is that an approval nobody read is not an approval, and the audit trail will show a month of them before anyone notices the first mistake. Reading the table is the product.

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Put it on the firm’s calendar

A scheduled prompt knows when it runs; it does not know what is due. Zeno holds that. An engagement is a standing commitment — work this client’s books monthly, due the tenth business day — that opens a period every cycle and puts it on the console’s Today queue until a person closes it. Ask the assistant to create one:
That is qb_create_engagement, which binds the playbook in the same call. From then on the scheduled prompt can be shorter still — call qb_due_work and work whatever it lists — and changing a client’s cadence means changing the engagement, never the prompt. A person says when a period is finished (qb_close_period), parks one that is waiting on a statement (qb_park_period), and retires the engagement when the work ends (qb_retire_engagement). The console’s Engagements page shows what is open, how late, and which machines have checked in.

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Know when it stopped

The scheduled prompt should call qb_due_work even when nothing is due. That call is the machine’s heartbeat. Under Settings → Notifications, choose how many quiet days count as stopped and enable Nothing is running. See Notifications. Prepared work appears in qb_list_plans; the scheduled agent should also write what it did to the work log. Applying remains a separate, reviewed action.