As of 13 August 2026, AI can categorise your business expenses.

What to actually do

1. Hand it to a person

   The route this page recommends

   A person who owns the outcome does this end to end, worth it when the failure is dear.

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 your bookkeeping software or spreadsheet and export the relevant business transactions with dates, descriptions, amounts, references and any existing categories.
   2. Gather the matching receipts, invoices and supplier details, removing unrelated personal data before pasting anything into a chatbot.
   3. Open your current chart of accounts and record your business type, legal structure, VAT registration status and any categories your accountant already uses.
   4. Paste the chart of accounts, business context and transaction or receipt data into the prompt, then ask the model to produce the categorisation table and checking queue.
   5. Compare every suggested category with the original receipt or invoice and correct the supplier, business purpose, amount and transaction reference where they do not match.
   6. Send every low-confidence, mixed-use, capital, entertainment and VAT-unclear item to your accountant before posting it to the accounts.
   7. Import or enter only the checked categories into your bookkeeping records, keeping the source receipt and the AI output together as an audit trail.

   Prompt

   Categorise the business expenses in the data below for UK bookkeeping.
   
   Use this chart of accounts: [PASTE YOUR CHART OF ACCOUNTS].
   
   For each transaction, return a table with:
   1. Date
   2. Supplier or description
   3. Amount and currency
   4. Suggested account category
   5. Business purpose inferred from the information provided
   6. VAT status: standard-rated, zero-rated, exempt, outside scope, no VAT evidence, or unclear
   7. Confidence: high, medium or low
   8. A short reason
   9. The exact information or receipt needed to confirm it
   
   Rules:
   - Do not invent suppliers, amounts, VAT rates, receipts, business purposes or categories.
   - Use "unclear" where the evidence is insufficient.
   - Separate personal, mixed-use and business expenses.
   - Flag possible capital purchases, loans, drawings, transfers, payroll, entertainment, travel, subscriptions and payments with no receipt.
   - Do not decide whether an expense is tax-deductible or give VAT advice. Flag those items for an accountant.
   - Preserve the original transaction reference so I can trace every row back to the source.
   
   After the table, list only the low-confidence, mixed-use, possible capital and VAT-unclear items in a checking queue.
   
   Business context: [DESCRIBE THE BUSINESS, LEGAL STRUCTURE AND VAT REGISTRATION STATUS].
   Transactions and receipt details:
   [PASTE THE TRANSACTION LIST OR RECEIPT DATA HERE]

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