AI prompts for writing SOPs, reports, policies and checklists

Writing the documents that keep a business running (standard operating procedures, status reports, onboarding plans, policy checks) is slow, and it's often what gets skipped. These prompts give an AI assistant the structure to draft them from your rough notes, so you only have to review and correct.

46 free prompts across 14 categories. Each one links to the real-world example it is based on. Updated October 24, 2026

How to use these prompts

1. Dump your messy notes or a voice-memo transcript in; the prompts are designed to handle rough input.
2. Ask for the document in the format your team already uses (Google Doc headings, Notion page, numbered steps).
3. Have the person who actually does the task review any SOP before it becomes official.
4. Re-run report prompts weekly with the same structure so reports are easy to compare.

The 46 prompts

• Competitor watch reportMonitor competitor pricing, launches and messaging. · Marketing · beginner
• Market size & trend reportGet a cited overview of a market before you commit. · Research · beginner
• Weekly status reportCompile updates into a status report with blockers flagged. · Operations · beginner
• Write an SOP from a messy processDocument how things are done so an agent (or new hire) can follow it. · Operations · beginner
• Expense policy checkerCheck expense claims against your policy. · Finance · beginner
• Summarize a long documentGet the key points of a contract, report, or PDF fast. · Personal Productivity · beginner
• New hire onboarding planCreate a 30-60-90 day plan and welcome pack. · HR & People · beginner
• Job description + screening questionsWrite a clear job post and fair screening questions. · HR & People · beginner
• Access provisioning checklistStandardize who gets what access when people join or leave, like Avalara's provisioning agent. · IT & Internal Help · intermediate
• Incident summary writerTurn alerts and chat logs into a clear incident report. · IT & Internal Help · intermediate
• Missing-documents chaserAsk clients for the paperwork you need, send reminders, and report what's still missing, like a two-person advisory firm that cut admin per file from 6 hours to 2.5. · Operations · intermediate
• Talent market intelligence for a roleTurn a job description into a hiring-manager brief with comparable roles, pay ranges, and talent-pool notes across locations, like the ChatGPT Work tool Oracle's talent acquisition team built that cut research from 2–4 days to about 15–20 minutes. · HR & People · beginner
• Stress-test a technical document before you share itHave an agent check a paper, report or deck for unsupported claims, math or logic errors, and gaps in evidence before reviewers see it, like Google's Deep Review, which gave pre-submission feedback on 16,000+ manuscripts at STOC, ICML, NeurIPS and ICLR before launching publicly for docs and presentations. · Research · intermediate
• Draft a bank-style credit memo from deal docsEncode your firm's credit methodology as a reusable skill so an agent turns financial statements and deal docs into a source-grounded credit memo for analyst review, like Box Agent using Anthropic's Skills API for banking credit memos. · Finance · intermediate
• Automate purchase-order accruals for closeHave an agent read your accrual SOP, chase PO owners for delivery dates, calculate time-proportional accruals, and park journal entries for review—like Rivian's Bedrock agents that removed over 15 days of manual close work per cycle. · Finance · advanced
• Answer the money and security questions before an agent goes liveBefore building an agent, answer the five questions your finance and security people will ask: which workflow and what it costs today, what the agent costs to run and its ceiling, what happens if it fails, where the data goes, and who can change or switch it off. Paul Bracht uses this checklist with CFOs and CISOs at portfolio companies, with examples like a $20 daily spending cap. · Business Strategy · beginner
• Draft a fleet repair estimate in minutesTurn a driver's report of a truck problem, plus vehicle and maintenance history, into a repair estimate draft a human reviews—work that used to take 8–48 hours. Cox Automotive's FleetMate estimator assistant cut that to about 30 minutes and absorbed a tenfold volume spike without proportional cost growth. · Operations · intermediate
• Keep CRM and prospect records continuously freshDescribe the accounts you care about and let a fleet of research agents keep company, contact, and buying-signal fields updated from many sources—instead of SDRs manually cleaning the CRM. Floqer's customers report cutting prospecting time by as much as 70%. · Sales · beginner
• Review a draft agreement against your precedents and playbookFeed a draft agreement, a few chosen precedents and your negotiating playbook to an AI that reviews it from several angles, has the findings challenged, and returns a memo plus proposed tracked changes for a lawyer to accept or reject. Sullivan & Cromwell built its Agreement Analyzer this way with OpenAI. · Legal & Compliance · advanced
• Check an issued insurance policy against what the client actually orderedLet an agent compare a policy the carrier issued with your agency's records and source documents, flag mismatched coverages, limits or deductibles, and suggest fixes for staff to approve. Vertafore made its Policy Check and Policy Intake agents generally available, and says early trials cut policy checking time by up to 90% per line of business and intake time by up to 87%. · Operations · intermediate
• Have your AI assistant spot gaps in the AR report and ask the right person to fix themGive an AI assistant your accounts receivable aging report and invoice list, let it find where the totals don't agree, and have it draft a clear request to the colleague who owns the numbers. A consultancy head set up ChatGPT's Dot agent as an executive assistant named Hannah with its own company email, and shared an email where it asked a colleague to reconcile a USD 59,819.26 AR summary with a USD 68,523.21 invoice total, pointing out the USD 8,703.95 gap matched four new invoices dated 14 October. · Finance · beginner
• Grade an investment memo against your fund's mandate before committeeUse an evaluation agent to read a draft investment memo the way a senior reviewer would: check sources and numbers, test the thesis against the fund's mandate and recent deals, and give pass/fail per criterion with a one-line fix. Terminal X's Eval Agent does this on a 54-criterion rubric and agrees with senior human reviewers 88.6% of the time. · Finance · advanced
• Answer every catering or event inquiry fast, even when you're not thereRestaurants and venues lose catering and private-event bookings when inquiries sit until the owner is back in the building. One restaurant owner shared on Oct 21, 2026 that putting written checklists, event runbooks and an AI agent on every inquiry took catering from 1 or 2 bookings a month to 7 to 12. · Sales · beginner
• Have an agent score every support conversation against your quality checklistSupport teams usually spot-check a handful of calls and chats each week. A quality agent can review every conversation against the same checklist for accuracy, tone, compliance and brand standards, and surface coaching moments and risky interactions. Microsoft announced Contact Center Intelligence in public preview on Oct 21, 2026, including a Quality Assurance Agent that continuously evaluates interactions and works with existing contact centers through an open connector. · Customer Support · intermediate
• Let customers buy and change their plan by chat, with a person ready for judgment callsSimple changes like updating an address, switching a plan or moving a payment date shouldn't need a phone queue. Give a chat agent your rules so it can complete routine changes for customers any time of day, and hand anything unusual to a person with a clear summary. On Oct 21, 2026, UK insurer 1st Central Group launched Motivo with Microsoft: its assistant KAI helps customers buy cover, make policy changes and manage payments 24 hours a day by chat or voice, with specialists available when judgment is needed, and early testing showed comparable interactions take about 40% less time. · Customer Support · intermediate
• Brief your technicians before each job and let them talk through their notes afterward instead of typingField technicians lose time hunting for the right unit, the old service notes and the manual, then write up their report in the van. An AI assistant can brief them on the job before they arrive (which equipment, what the issue is, what tools to bring, past history) and, after the work, interview them by voice, asking follow-up questions until the notes are complete. Microsoft reported on Oct 22, 2026 that TK Elevator technicians now get this pre-visit briefing on their phone and dictate their work to a debriefing voice agent, and those spoken notes are shared with colleagues who service the same equipment later. TKE has 25,000 service technicians caring for 1.4 million elevators and escalators. · Operations · intermediate
• Pull every promise out of a client contract and turn it into an owned, dated checklist so nothing gets missedContracts and statements of work bury commitments such as reporting dates, staffing levels, service levels and penalties across dozens of pages, and missing one can cost money and reputation. AI agents can read each contract, list every obligation with the page it came from, assign an owner and due date, and flag clauses that conflict. Microsoft reported on Oct 21, 2026 that Birlasoft built a system of six specialist agents, coordinated by a planning agent, that extracts and validates obligations from more than 1,000 statements of work a year, finding over 10 obligations per project on average and saving about 4,000 person-hours a year, with people reviewing the results because the obligations carry financial and legal weight. · Legal & Compliance · intermediate
• Get a monthly keyword ranking report for each Amazon product in minutes instead of hours of exportsAmazon and Walmart sellers and the agencies that manage them spend days each month exporting keyword rankings and search volumes into spreadsheets to see what's slipping. An AI agent can pull those numbers together for each product and point out what changed and what to do next. Helium 10 reported on Oct 21, 2026 that ecommerce agency CoreTrex now asks its Helium agent for a ranking-shift and search-volume report per product (ASIN), cutting each report from 30 to 45 minutes down to 5 to 10, about 80% less time, so the team reviews keywords far more often and adjusts targeting and ad spend faster. · Ecommerce · beginner
• Build the policy document pack for every new insurance claim automatically, so adjusters start with everything in one fileWhen a new loss is reported, someone has to look up the policy, pull the declarations page and every endorsement that applied on the date of loss, and bundle them for the adjuster, which takes about 15 minutes per claim and invites mistakes. An AI agent can read the loss report, find the policy number and date, gather the right documents, put them into one ordered PDF and tell the team when it's done or what's missing. Bevaya's case study says a US property and casualty insurer handling 200,000+ new loss reports a year cut this first-notice-of-loss step from 15 minutes to under 4, reaching a 99.9% no-touch rate and saving 36,000+ hours a year. · Operations · advanced
• Give store and office staff instant answers from your company documents, showing only what each person is allowed to seeIn businesses with many locations, staff waste minutes digging through shared folders for a procedure, policy or price rule, or they interrupt a manager. An AI assistant connected to your SharePoint or Google Drive can answer in plain words, quote the document it used and only search files that employee can already open. Models at Work reported on Oct 22, 2026 that pet-care retailer IskayPet, with 330+ stores and 4,500 staff in Spain, Portugal and France, cut the time to find an operational answer from 3 to 5 minutes to about 7 seconds with an assistant built on Amazon Bedrock over its SharePoint documents. · IT & Internal Help · intermediate
• Find past job applicants who fit the role you're hiring for now and invite them backMost businesses already have strong runner-up candidates sitting in old applications, but nobody has time to dig through them when a new role opens. An AI assistant can compare your new job description against past applicants, shortlist the best matches with reasons, and draft a friendly re-engagement message for you to review. Paylocity launched Recruiting Optimizer on Oct 22, 2026, including a Talent Rediscovery Agent that identifies previous applicants who match current hiring needs, with recruiters setting the criteria and reviewing every output. · HR & People · beginner
• Ask why today's card payout is lower than today's sales and get a line-by-line answerCard terminals, delivery apps and payment processors rarely pay out exactly what you sold, and owners often end up comparing reports after closing to work out where the difference went. An AI assistant given your sales report and payout statement can walk through every gap: fees, refunds, chargebacks, tips, held funds and timing. Qashier launched QashierGM on Oct 23, 2026, an AI general manager for more than 25,000 Southeast Asian merchants that works from each shop's own transactions and settlements and can explain, line by line, why a payout is lower than the day's sales. · Finance · beginner
• Get a morning report of every lead nobody called back, every overdue follow-up and every appointment missing from your CRMLeads rarely go cold because nobody cares; they go cold because a callback slipped or a new form fill sat unseen for a day. An AI agent can check your CRM every morning, list the leads with no first contact, the follow-ups that are past due and the appointments that were never logged, and send that list to the person who fixes it in the chat app your team already uses. Ryan Murray, who owns a 21-person shutter and shade manufacturer and installer, shared on X on Oct 17, 2026 that his team built this check on their GoHighLevel CRM with Claude: one report caught a lead with no reply for 19 days and a promised callback more than a week late, and first-hour lead response misses fell from 9 to 1 in a week (he says not all of that is down to AI). · Sales · beginner
• Turn a pile of loan or credit application documents into a one-page review memo: have an AI sort the paperwork, work out income, check it against your rules and flag mismatchesLenders, brokers, landlords and finance teams lose hours sorting pay slips, statements and IDs, retyping figures and hunting for numbers that don't add up before anyone can make a decision. An AI agent can sort each document by type, pull out the key figures, calculate income the way your policy says, test it against your rules and list any discrepancies in a short memo a person reviews. TD Bank Group said (May 21 and Oct 13, 2026) its agentic AI classifies client documents, extracts key information, calculates income, validates figures against selected policy requirements and flags discrepancies to produce an underwriter summary, cutting average mortgage pre-adjudication time from 15 hours to under three minutes, with colleagues reviewing every output. · Finance · intermediate
• Take the server your AI agent runs on off the public internet: put it behind Tailscale or a Cloudflare Tunnel so only you can reach itLots of people now run AI agents around the clock on a rented server (a VPS). On Oct 23, 2026, as reports of hacks spread, Pieter Levels (@levelsio) reposted his advice to get any VPS off the public internet and into a Tailscale network and Cloudflare Tunnel, noting that SSH key login alone doesn't protect you from exploits and vulnerabilities; the post drew hundreds of thousands of views and thousands of bookmarks. This prompt has an AI walk you through it step by step, checking each step before you close the old door so you don't lock yourself out. · Security · intermediate
• Answer every restaurant call, even six at once: a phone agent texts a booking link, takes same-day reservations and captures large-party and private event inquiriesCalibrate built an AI phone agent for its own 156-year-old restaurant group in Greenport, NY, after seeing up to six people call Claudio's Waterfront at the same moment on busy nights. Their October 2026 write-up reports about 15,000 calls answered in one season, 12,000+ covers from booking links the agent texted after a call (1,660 booked the same day), 136 large-party inquiries captured instead of lost on a notepad, and roughly 300 staff hours saved on the phone. Use this prompt to design the call flow for your own place before you pick a voice agent tool. · Customer Support · intermediate
• Have two coding agents build a feature together: one leads and plans, the other builds, and they review each other's pull requests through a shared chat log fileDave Martin (@itsdavemartin) described on X (Oct 23, 2026) how he builds with Claude and Codex together: Codex first turns his brief into a clickable HTML mockup, then Claude takes the lead, writes Linear issues and a plan, and the two agents coordinate through a /planning folder holding one markdown chat log, a checkbox plan and a list of decisions. Each works in its own copy of the repo, opens small pull requests, and neither may merge its own. He reports a help center feature took 23 pull requests and 95 help docs, starting one afternoon and finishing the next morning, from three prompts and a few answers. This prompt sets up that hand-off for your own project. · Coding · advanced
• Find out which of your X posts actually work: have Grok study your last two months of posts and give you a 15-day posting plan with example postsInstead of posting blindly, Qais (@Ahmadullah_Faiz) shared on X (Oct 23, 2026) a prompt for Grok to analyze your X profile from the past two months, find which posts get the most engagement and what you're doing wrong, and build a concrete 15-day posting plan. They suggest asking for 10 example posts based on what already worked, then pasting the report into ChatGPT to catch anything Grok missed, and say it worked for them. This prompt expands that into a full routine. · Marketing · beginner
• Run big decisions past an AI board room: six seats (Chair, Finance, Skeptic, Mission, Operator, Counsel) each vote Go, Go if or No-go, and the Chair writes a decision memoOne AI chat tends to make your idea sound better than it is. Wayne Lowry (@wikiwayne) described on X (Oct 23, 2026) the "Board Room" he built: a chat with six AI seats that each judge one decision through their own lens. Chair runs the room and writes the memo, Finance checks cost and worst case, Skeptic makes the strongest case it fails, Mission asks who it affects, Operator asks who does what by when, and Counsel flags what needs a signature or a real lawyer. Each seat votes Go, Go if or No-go, and the Chair writes the recommendation, the vote, where the seats disagreed, the top risk, next steps and what would reverse the call. He ran it on whether to buy a second AI computer now; no seat voted to buy now, and the memo listed what had to be true first. He still makes the final call himself. · Business Strategy · intermediate
• Check that every screen of your app really matches the design: have a coding agent screenshot each screen, pixel-diff it against the design file, rank the worst matches and fix them until only text smoothing differsApps often drift from their designs a few pixels at a time. Danish Dhamani (@DanishDhamani), CEO of Orai, posted on X (Oct 23, 2026) that he had Claude screenshot all 207 screens of his app and pixel-diff them against the design files. Some screens were 20% off, and one prompt found every one. He shared the prompt: render each screen in the exact state of its design PNG through a dev-only route, screenshot it with Playwright at the PNG's size and pixel ratio, diff with pixelmatch while masking the phone status bar, save side-by-side comparisons, write a report sorted worst to best, then fix spacing, font and component sizes and re-run until only text anti-aliasing differs. · Coding · advanced
• Turn your own month-end reconciliation workbook into AI close agents: hand over the spreadsheet you already use, let the AI roll it forward each month, and keep a person reviewing and posting every entryInstead of redesigning how they close the books, Charlotte accounting firm Lavoie CPA gave Truewind its existing balance sheet reconciliation workbook plus the monthly input files that feed it (payroll registers, brokerage statements, Stripe and Braintree exports, donor platform reports). Truewind built AI workpaper agents from that workbook; each month a staff member rolls them forward, reviews the output and posts the entries to Sage Intacct herself. Truewind's case study (Oct 21, 2026) says one client's full monthly close, reconciliations included, took about 30 to 45 minutes, and the firm grew from 8 to 15 client entities on the system between April and October 2026 without backfilling two staff roles. The lesson for any small business or bookkeeper: start from the process you already trust, automate one close at a time, and keep a human approving every entry. · Finance · intermediate
• Let your AI assistant trade for you on Coinbase, but only inside a small separate portfolio: connect it, have it research and preview every order, and approve each trade yourselfOn Oct 22, 2026 Coinbase posted that it is 'open for AI agents': you can connect ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, Muse and other assistants to your Coinbase account to research, manage a portfolio and trade crypto, stocks and derivatives from one conversation. 24/7 Wall St. reports the connection uses Coinbase's MCP server (in ChatGPT you add agents.coinbase.com/mcp as a custom server, log in and pick which portfolios the agent may touch), that orders can be previewed first, and that you can disconnect the agent at any time. Coinbase advises giving the AI its own portfolio funded only with money you can afford to lose, because an agent can misread a vague instruction like 'buy a little' and you stay responsible for the trade. This prompt keeps the agent in research-and-preview mode with hard limits you set. · Finance · intermediate
• Hand your office busywork to an AI agent safely, even on a locked-down work laptop: inbox sorting, call notes, filing and first drafts, with a rule that it never deletes anythingYou don't need to code or have admin rights to get real office work off your plate. A non-developer posting as Dédale on X (Oct 23, 2026) wrote that an AI agent now does a real chunk of their office work on a locked-down work laptop, mostly before they sit down: sorting the inbox each morning, turning call notes into clean notes, filing attachments in the right folders, and producing first versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint files. The mistake they made at the start was letting it delete files; now it moves everything to an 'Old' folder and nothing is thrown away, so the worst it can do is put a file in the wrong place. This prompt sets up that morning routine with the same no-delete rule. Check your employer's AI policy before connecting work accounts. · Personal Productivity · beginner
• Before you hand your service business to AI agents, write down how you actually do the work: turn your know-how into step-by-step workflow docs each agent follows, and review every output at firstAgents can only run a business the way you do if your know-how is written down. Emergent reported (Oct 23, 2026) that Sydney recruiter Alicia Keenan rebuilt her firm around four AI agents that find new business, produce market intelligence, nurture candidates and run searches, after spending months writing about 200 workflow documents to capture nearly two decades of expertise. The agents still make mistakes (garbled early reports, candidates shortlisted from the wrong country, emails in the wrong tone), so she checks every interaction and fixes the workflow each time something goes wrong, and expects about 18 months before she can step back from close supervision. This prompt helps you write the first workflow docs and the checks around them. · HR & People · advanced
• Pull every deadline out of a signed purchase agreement into a dated checklist for you, the client and the lenderMissed contingency and closing deadlines are one of the costliest mistakes in a transaction. This prompt reads the accepted offer and addenda and builds a dated checklist (inspection, financing, appraisal, title, walkthrough, closing) with who owns each step and the clause it came from, so you can check it against the contract. · Operations · beginner
• Hunt for security bugs like a team: give Claude Code a playbook built from 700+ real disclosed reports, and only test targets you're authorized to testAsking an AI to "find bugs" gets noise. A free open-source kit, Claude-BugHunter, packs 83 security skills and 700+ patterns from real disclosed bug reports into Claude Code, and walks a set path: confirm scope, map the attack surface, hunt by vulnerability type, reproduce and kill false positives, then write a report triage teams actually read. Payouts aren't guaranteed, and testing anything outside an authorized program's scope is illegal. · Security · advanced

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