As of 13 August 2026, AI can code your expenses to the right nominal accounts.

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 your bookkeeping system and export the unposted expense transactions with their references, dates, suppliers, descriptions, amounts and receipt links.
   2. Open the current chart of nominal accounts and copy the account codes and names, including any notes about restricted or commonly used accounts.
   3. Gather the business context, accounting policy and examples of previously approved postings, especially for equipment, travel, entertaining, subscriptions, mileage, home working and director or employee expenses.
   4. Remove unnecessary personal data from the export, then paste the chart, context, policy and transactions into the prompt in the labelled sections.
   5. Ask the model to return the proposed account, confidence, reason and REVIEW status for every transaction, then paste its table into a working spreadsheet beside the original transaction data.
   6. Compare every proposed account with its receipt, business purpose and previous approved treatment, and send all REVIEW items and low-confidence items to your accountant or bookkeeper before posting.
   7. Post only the approved account codes in your bookkeeping system and retain the prompt output with the transaction records as a draft review trail.

   Prompt

   You are helping with UK bookkeeping, not replacing an accountant. Code each expense below to the most appropriate nominal account from the supplied chart of accounts. Use the business context and accounting policy supplied. Do not invent accounts, VAT rates, suppliers, dates or amounts. If an item is ambiguous, unusual, personal, capital, mixed-use, likely to involve a director or employee, or could have a different VAT treatment, mark it REVIEW rather than guessing. For each item, return: transaction reference, suggested nominal account code, account name, VAT treatment only if it is explicitly supported by the supplied information, confidence as high, medium or low, and a short reason. Then list all REVIEW items with the exact missing information needed to decide them. Treat the suggestions as draft bookkeeping only and state where an accountant or bookkeeper should confirm the treatment.
   
   Business context:
   [Describe the business and what it sells]
   
   Accounting policy or previous treatment:
   [Paste any relevant policy or examples of approved postings]
   
   Chart of accounts:
   [Paste account codes and names]
   
   Expense transactions:
   [Paste a table with transaction reference, date, supplier, description, amount, currency, receipt details and any VAT information]
   
   Return the results as a table that can be pasted into a spreadsheet.

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