As of 13 August 2026, AI can only partly assign the correct UK VAT rate to your purchases.

What to actually do

1. Hand it to a person

   The route this page recommends

   Someone with a licence or accountable authority has to sign this before it counts.

2. Use a tool built for this

   Second choice

3. Do it yourself

   The distant third

   A chat interface, chat-fluent skill, and roughly 30 minutes until you can act on the result.

   How to actually do it

   1. Open the purchase invoices, receipts and supplier bills for the period you are coding, and put each transaction into a list with its description, supplier, country, date, net amount, VAT shown and gross amount.
   2. Add the business facts that affect the treatment, including whether the business is VAT registered, what it sells, where it operates and whether each purchase is wholly or partly for business use.
   3. Paste the list and business facts into the prompt, keeping invoice wording intact and marking any missing detail instead of filling it in.
   4. Ask the chatbot to use current GOV.UK or HMRC sources and return the proposed treatment, source link, confidence and missing facts for every item.
   5. Open each cited HMRC or GOV.UK page and compare the item description and circumstances with the relevant rule, including any exceptions or place-of-supply conditions.
   6. Move any item whose source, facts or VAT treatment does not match cleanly into the needs-review list, and ask an accountant or VAT adviser to resolve that list before posting the codes or submitting a VAT return.
   7. Enter only the checked treatments into your bookkeeping system and retain the invoice, source link and review decision with the transaction.

   Prompt

   You are helping with UK business bookkeeping. Assign the most likely UK VAT treatment to each purchase below, using only current GOV.UK or HMRC guidance available to you and checking the rules current on 13 August 2026. Do not guess, invent a VAT rate, or treat missing information as settled.
   
   For each purchase, return:
   - the proposed VAT treatment and rate
   - whether the purchase appears standard-rated, zero-rated, reduced-rated, exempt, outside the scope, or unable to determine
   - the facts that support the decision
   - the exact GOV.UK or HMRC source link and the relevant passage or heading
   - the confidence level
   - the missing fact that could change the result
   - whether I should refer it to an accountant or VAT adviser
   
   Separate the answer into "ready to code" and "needs review". Put every ambiguous, unusual, mixed-use, overseas, imported, private-use, or partially recoverable item in "needs review". Do not decide whether input VAT is recoverable unless the supplied facts and cited HMRC guidance clearly support that conclusion. If the source does not establish the answer, say so plainly.
   
   Business details: [business type and VAT registration status]
   Purchase date or tax period: [date or period]
   Supplier and country: [supplier and country]
   Purchase details: [paste invoice descriptions, amounts, VAT shown, and any relevant context]
   

   Open it prefilled in ChatGPT or Claude, or copy it into Gemini, which takes no prefill link.