About me
I am Robin James Lewis from Balingen at the foot of the Swabian Alb in southern Germany. After thirteen years in retail and three years running the administration of a cultural centre, I am becoming a certified tax clerk, with my own set of clients in bookkeeping, payroll and annual accounts at a tax firm in Balingen. The final examinations take place in the winter of 2026/27.
Working hands-on and training new staff in administration and accounting across different industries has taught me to see through processes quickly. I notice where the same data is entered more than once – the subject of one of my first Food for Thought posts – and where steps can be simplified or fully automated by connecting the underlying data. With tools such as Claude Code I turn this into programs that fit into people's working day and work there. At the tax firm, receipts and bank transactions now reach the books through imports rather than by hand, and recurring reports are produced by a small program instead of by hand in Excel. The work becomes easier and takes considerably less time.
Under robin.vision I present tools for accounting, administration and other business processes – such as SmartFormular, whose FiBu lite and E-Rechnung lite are free to try until 31 December 2026. From 2027 I will analyse processes with firms and companies, train their teams – including in workshops on AI literacy with EU AI Act training – and build with them on what works – using tools I recommend or develop myself. Every Friday I write a Food for Thought post on automation and AI in accounting.
Career
- 2007–2016
- Retail: sales assistant, later deputy store manager at a beverage store.
- 2016–2020
- Assistant to the branch management of the same chain: staff budget and rent for up to 56 stores, HR administration, contracts for expansion.
- 2020–2023
- Head of administration of a socio-cultural centre: bookkeeping and payroll, HR, property and third-party funding, commercial management of a €10 million refurbishment, introduction of employee self-service software, crisis management during the pandemic.
- since 2024
- Retraining as a certified tax clerk; since 2025 in practice at a tax firm with my own set of clients. There I moved accounts payable and receivable from manual entry to automated imports and built a controlling system with a weekly KPI report (Python, APIs).
- Qualifications
- Advanced technical college entrance qualification (2007), IHK trainer aptitude examination (2017), preparatory course DATEV Kanzlei-Rechnungswesen, passed with distinction (2023).
What I work with
- Accounting and payroll
- DATEV Kanzlei-Rechnungswesen
- DATEV LODAS · Lohn und Gehalt
- DATEV Unternehmen Online
- ADDISON
- Upstream systems
- Automated document capture
- Invoice auto-fetching from portals
- Imports and interfaces
- In the business
- SAP ERP
- Lexware Office
- Automation and AI
- Python
- ChatGPT
- Claude
- Copilot
- Gemini
- Giotto.ai
I use Python for automation and interfaces, and language models as the task requires, under one fixed rule: they prepare, I decide. I work in German and English.
Voluntary work
Lay judge at the Administrative Court of Sigmaringen. I helped set up two cultural associations as founding treasurer, and I support associations with statutes, charitable status, bookkeeping and funding applications.
Why a robin
In the year I was born, a pair of robins nested at my parents' house and the chicks hatched – that is how I got my name. In Welsh a robin is a robin goch; my father is from Wales. That is why a robin sits on the home page, and why my assistant there is called Goch.