Organize a year of receipts with Claude (tax time system)

What you are building 🧾

A folder full of mixed receipts (phone photos, email PDFs, screenshots) goes in. Out comes:

• 📊 receipts.csv: every receipt as a row: date, merchant, category, amount, tax (only if printed), payment method, confidence
• 📝 summary.md: totals by category and by month, possible duplicates, months with zero receipts (so you know what's missing), and a manual review list for anything Claude couldn't read
• 🔁 A re-run system so next year this takes 5 minutes a month instead of one painful weekend

Claude reads the receipt images itself, no OCR app or bookkeeping subscription needed.

Before you start ✅

• 🤖 Claude on any paid plan: Claude Code in the terminal, or the Code tab in Claude Desktop (open the app, click Code, choose Local, Select folder)
• 📱 iPhone photos heads-up: iPhones shoot HEIC by default and Claude can't read those directly. Easiest fix: let Claude convert them (it's step 1 of the prompt below). Prevention: Settings, Camera, Formats, Most Compatible
• 📸 For paper receipts, any free scanner works: the built-in Apple Notes scanner, Google Drive's scan button, or Adobe Scan's free tier. The scan app's quality barely matters, Claude reads the image itself, it just needs to be flat and glare-free
• 📁 Make one folder called receipts and dump EVERYTHING in. Don't sort it, that's the whole point

The mega prompt 📋

Open Claude Code (or the Code tab) in the folder that contains your receipts folder and paste this:

I have a folder called ./receipts containing a year of mixed receipts: phone photos (some HEIC), email PDFs, and screenshots. Organize all of it into a spreadsheet. Follow these rules exactly.

SETUP
1. List every file in ./receipts first and give me a count by type. Convert any HEIC files to JPEG before reading them (on Mac use sips). Never modify or delete an original file.
2. Work in batches of about 15 files so nothing gets lost. After each batch, append rows to receipts.csv before starting the next batch.

FOR EACH RECEIPT, EXTRACT
- merchant (the trading name printed on the receipt)
- date in YYYY-MM-DD. If the printed date is ambiguous (like 03/04/2026), use context like weekday names to resolve it; if you can't resolve it confidently, write AMBIGUOUS and add it to the review list.
- total amount and currency. If it's in a foreign currency, record the original amount. Never convert currencies.
- tax (GST, VAT, or sales tax): ONLY if a tax amount is printed on the receipt. Never calculate or infer tax that isn't shown.
- payment method if visible
- category from exactly this list: software-subscriptions, equipment-hardware, office-supplies, phone-internet, travel-transport, meals-entertainment, education-courses, marketing-advertising, contractor-services, home-office, personal, unclear
- source_file (the filename) and confidence (high / medium / low)

HARD RULES
- NEVER invent or estimate a number. If a field is unreadable (blurry, faded, cropped, glare), write UNREADABLE, set confidence to low, and add the file to the manual review list. A blank cell is always better than a guessed number.
- If one photo contains multiple receipts, one row per receipt, note "multi-receipt photo".
- If a file isn't a receipt at all, skip it and list it under "not a receipt" in the summary.
- Duplicates: if two rows share merchant, date, and amount, keep both and mark them possible duplicates. Never delete either, two identical coffees in one day is a real thing.

OUTPUT 1: receipts.csv
Columns: date, merchant, description, category, amount, currency, tax, payment_method, possible_duplicate, confidence, notes, source_file. Sorted by date.

OUTPUT 2: summary.md
- Total spend, and totals by category and by month
- Possible duplicates listed side by side
- Missing months: any month with zero receipts, so I can check whether I lost them or just spent nothing
- Manual review list: every UNREADABLE or low-confidence row with the filename and what's wrong
- "Worth reviewing as possible business expenses": receipts that look business-related, framed as items for me and my accountant to review, not as tax advice

VERIFY BEFORE FINISHING
- Row count in receipts.csv plus skipped files must equal the total file count from setup. If they don't match, find the gap.
- Re-open receipts.csv and confirm the category totals in summary.md match the rows.
- Tell me the 5 rows you're least confident about.

Swap the category list for your own life. The VERIFY block is the part that makes this trustworthy: Claude has to reconcile its own row count and confess its shakiest reads.

The 5-minutes-a-month system 🔁

So you never face a year-sized shoebox again:

1. 📂 Folder structure: Receipts/FY2026-27/ with an inbox folder and a processed folder, receipts.csv and summary.md at the top
2. 📧 Gmail filter: subject has receipt OR invoice OR "tax invoice", has attachment, apply label "Receipts". Once a month, drag that label's PDFs into inbox
3. 📲 Once a month, AirDrop the month's receipt photos into inbox
4. ⚡ Power move: save the mega prompt as a CLAUDE.md file inside the Receipts folder. From then on your entire monthly run is one line:

New receipts are in ./inbox. Process them with the same rules as before: extract, never guess, flag unreadables. Append new rows to receipts.csv without touching existing rows, regenerate summary.md, check new rows against existing ones for duplicates, then move successfully logged files to ./processed.

What Claude won't do, on purpose 🛑

• 🚫 It never guesses a number. Faded thermal receipt? It writes UNREADABLE and puts it on your review list. Anthropic's own docs flag accuracy risk on low-quality images, which is exactly why the prompt forbids guessing
• 🔍 It flags duplicates, it never deletes them. Same cafe, same day, same amount can be two real coffees. You decide
• 🧑‍💼 A category is not a deduction. The summary says "worth reviewing with your accountant", never "claim this". Claude does the data entry, humans do the judgment

The tax facts, wherever you live 🌍

The fine print varies by country, but the parts that make this system work are near-universal:

• 📸 Digital copies of receipts are officially accepted by the major tax offices: the US IRS (recordkeeping rules), the UK's HMRC (keeping records), and Australia's tax office, which explicitly allows "photos of your written evidence" (records rules). The copy has to be clear and complete, so spot-check that your photos are readable
• 🗓 Keep records for YEARS after you file, not months. The common range is 3 to 7 years depending on where you live (the US generally wants at least 3, Australia 5 from lodgment, the UK about 6 for the self-employed, which is 5 years past the January filing deadline). Check your country's rule once and note it at the top of your receipts folder
• 🧾 The tax column earns its keep. If your country breaks out GST, VAT or sales tax on receipts, keeping it as its own column saves your accountant real time
• 🧑‍💼 What's deductible is local and personal. That's exactly why the summary says "worth reviewing" instead of "claim this". One conversation with an accountant beats any AI on that question

🎁 10 more ways to automate tax season

Sorting receipts is the big one, but the same move (point Claude at your files, make it show its working) cleans up the rest of tax admin too. Everything below is about organising and preparing, never deciding what you can claim.

1. 💳 Categorise your bank and card exports. Download the year as CSV and have Claude group it by category and vendor with subtotals, plus a "needs review" flag on anything it isn't sure about. Turns 1,200 nameless lines into something you can actually read. (Heads up for Australia: a bank statement usually isn't enough on its own, because written evidence needs the supplier, what you bought and the date. Treat this as an organising layer, and check your tax office's rules for your situation.)
2. 🔗 Match receipts against bank lines. Feed it both your receipts.csv and your bank CSV and have it join them on date and amount. You get three lists: matched, receipts with no transaction, and transactions with no receipt. That third list is the money one, and you can still request copies from suppliers.
3. ✂️ Split business from personal, and show the working. Give Claude your rules ("this vendor is always business, this one is 60/40") and have it apply them across the year with a working-out column. If you claim a business portion, you'll generally need to be able to show how you worked it out, so keep the working.
4. 🔁 Audit your subscriptions. Have it scan 12 months for repeating vendor and amount patterns, then rank them by annual cost. It surfaces the price rises you never noticed and the zombie subscriptions you forgot to cancel. This one usually pays for itself.
5. 📧 Harvest the receipts hiding in your inbox. Search your email for receipt OR invoice OR "tax invoice" OR "order confirmation" inside the financial year, bulk save to PDF, then run the mega prompt over them. Most people's real evidence is buried in email, not in a drawer.
6. 📄 Build your accountant's summary pack. From the reconciled data, generate category totals, a list of genuinely ambiguous items written as questions for them, and an index linking back to the files. Less of their time spent sorting means more spent on your actual return.
7. 🚗 Sort out your car claim the compliant way. Read this one carefully, because it's the easiest to get wrong. A valid logbook needs odometer readings at the start and end of every trip, recorded at the time. A calendar almost never has those, so if you didn't capture them, you don't have a logbook and no amount of AI tidying creates one. Claude can reformat trip data you genuinely captured at the time, but it must not invent distances from addresses, because that's an estimate dressed up as a record. If you don't have a proper logbook, the honest route is the cents-per-kilometre method, where a reasonable estimate of your work kilometres is expressly allowed and you don't need receipts. Claude is genuinely useful there: have it total your regular trips from your calendar to work that estimate out.
8. 🏠 Total your work-from-home hours. Export your calendar and have Claude total the hours you actually logged, by month and year. Same caveat and it matters: an estimate made in July is not an acceptable record, only hours logged as you went. If you don't have them, set the habit up now for next year.
9. ✉️ Chase the missing paperwork. Hand it your "no receipt found" list and have it draft the emails asking each supplier for a duplicate copy. Twenty polite emails written in one go, and you just send them.
10. 📚 Build an asset register for the big purchases. For anything that's equipment rather than a consumable (laptop, camera, desk, phone), have Claude pull those into a separate register with purchase date, cost, supplier and the source file. Depreciation is your accountant's job, but handing them a clean list of what you bought and when saves an entire round of back-and-forth.

And the real fix for next year: one cloud folder, a phone shortcut that files a receipt in two taps, an email rule that auto-sorts the digital ones, and a 15-minute monthly run instead of a lost weekend in July. In Australia, the free ATO app's myDeductions does much of this natively and feeds straight into your return.

The links 🔗

🤖 Claude: claude.com (Claude Code or the Desktop Code tab, from the Pro plan)
📸 Free scanners: Apple Notes · Google Drive · Adobe Scan
🌍 Official record rules: US IRS · UK HMRC · Australia ATO