As of 13 August 2026, AI can prepare your expense data for your accountant.

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 1 hour until you can act on the result.

   How to actually do it

   1. Open the receipts, invoices, bank statements and card statements for the accounting period, and remove unrelated personal documents before uploading them.
   2. Gather the business type, accounting period, existing expense categories, known VAT registration details and any notes about unusual purchases.
   3. Paste the prompt into a chatbot and upload the records in clearly named groups, such as receipts, bank statement and card statement.
   4. Ask the model to produce the transaction table, exceptions table, reconciliation and missing-document checklist specified in the prompt.
   5. Export the result to a spreadsheet and compare every extracted date, supplier and amount against its cited receipt, invoice or statement row.
   6. Check the spreadsheet totals against the bank and card statement totals, mark duplicates and missing documents, and correct transcription errors.
   7. Send the checked spreadsheet, source documents and unresolved exceptions to your accountant, asking them to confirm categories, business purpose and VAT treatment before using the data.

   Prompt

   Prepare the attached UK business expense records for my accountant. Use only information present in the files and the notes below. Do not invent, estimate or infer missing figures. Extract and organise each item into a table with these columns: transaction date, supplier, description, gross amount in GBP, VAT amount in GBP if shown, net amount in GBP if shown, payment method, source file and page or row, proposed expense category, proposed VAT treatment, and confidence. Preserve the original currency and amount in a separate note if an item is not in GBP. Flag missing receipts, unreadable fields, possible duplicates, personal-looking expenses, unclear business purpose, credit notes, refunds, mileage, capital purchases, and any item where the VAT treatment is not explicit. Reconcile the extracted gross totals to the bank or card statement totals where possible and show any difference. Do not decide whether an expense is allowable for tax or whether VAT can be reclaimed. Put uncertain items in a separate exceptions table with a short question for my accountant. End with a checklist of documents or information I still need to provide. My business type and accounting period are: [business type and accounting period]. My existing expense categories are: [categories]. Additional notes are: [notes].

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