Receipts to a spreadsheet: how real estate agents can use Claude to sort tax time

Tax time used to cost me a weekend.

Not because any one receipt is hard. A receipt is a date, a supplier, an amount and some GST. The problem is there are a lot of them, they come in every shape, and someone has to read each one and type it into a spreadsheet. That someone was me.

It doesn't have to be you. Put your receipts in a folder, ask Claude for a spreadsheet, and it reads every one. The ones it isn't sure about go on a separate tab, so you only check those.

As always in this series, when I say SI (super intelligence) I mean tools like Claude, made by Anthropic. Most people say AI. Same thing.

Why this one matters for agents

Agents spend money all week in small amounts. Fuel, parking, signboards, printing, coffee with a client, a subscription that renewed without you noticing. Each one is small, but they pile up. Some are in your email, some are photos on your phone, some are crumpled in the car door.

None of it is difficult. It's just slow, and it always lands at the worst time, when you'd rather be prospecting or having a weekend.

This is exactly the kind of work from Day 1: a job, not a question. You don't need Claude to explain how to do a receipts spreadsheet. You need it to do the reading and the typing, and hand you back something you can check.

What Claude actually does with your receipts

Claude can read photos and PDFs, not just typed documents. So a photo of a paper receipt, a screenshot of an online order and a PDF invoice can all go in the same folder.

When you give it the job, it works through each file, pulls out the details you asked for and lays them out in rows and columns. You end up with one spreadsheet instead of a folder full of images.

The part that makes this trustworthy is the second tab. Some receipts will be faded, cut off, blurry or just odd. A good assistant wouldn't guess quietly on those. They'd put them aside and tell you why. That's what the prompt asks Claude to do.

So instead of checking every line, you check the short list it flagged, plus a quick look over the rest.

The Day 7 prompt

Read every receipt in this folder. Make a spreadsheet with date, supplier, amount, GST and category. Put anything you're not sure about on a second tab called Check these, and tell me why.

Here's what each part is doing.

• "Read every receipt in this folder." Tells it what to look at, and that you want all of them, not a sample. The folder is the boundary, so it isn't reading anything else.
• "Make a spreadsheet with date, supplier, amount, GST and category." Tells it what you want back and exactly which columns. Naming the columns means you get the same layout every time, which makes it easier to hand to your bookkeeper or accountant.
• "Put anything you're not sure about on a second tab called Check these." This is the safety net. Uncertain receipts don't get mixed in with the confident ones. They're kept separate so nothing slips through.
• "And tell me why." A reason next to each flagged receipt saves you working out what's wrong. "Total is cut off" or "can't tell if GST was charged" points you straight at the problem.

If you already use set categories, add them to the prompt, for example "use these categories: fuel, marketing, phone, office, other". Otherwise Claude will choose sensible ones, and you can adjust from there.

Try it yourself

1. Make a new folder. Copy in a batch of receipts. Photos, screenshots and PDFs are all fine. Use copies, not your originals, and start with a small batch while you're learning.
2. Open the Claude desktop app and add that folder. Under the message box, choose the option to work in a project or folder, and pick the folder you just made. Just that one folder.
3. Paste the prompt above, then add "show me your plan first" on the end, and send it.
4. Read the plan. Check it understood what's in the folder and what you want back. When you're happy, let it go ahead and allow it to save the spreadsheet in that folder.
5. Open the spreadsheet. Go to the Check these tab first and work through each flagged receipt using the reason it gave.
6. Spot-check the main tab. Pick a few rows and compare them against the original receipts. If the amounts and suppliers match, you can trust the rest more. If they don't, tell Claude what it got wrong and ask it to fix the spreadsheet.

Once you're comfortable, you can add new receipts to the folder each week and ask Claude to add them to the same spreadsheet, rather than saving the whole lot for tax time.

Keep it tight

Receipts carry more personal information than people think: card details, addresses, names, sometimes client names on a meal or a gift. So the same habits from Day 1 apply, and they matter a little more here.

• One narrow folder. Only the receipts for this job. Not your downloads, not your desktop, not your whole computer. If it isn't in the folder, Claude isn't reading it.
• Approvals on for anything that sends, spends or deletes. This job only needs Claude to read and save one new file. It shouldn't be emailing anything, paying anything or removing anything, and with approvals on, it can't without you saying yes.
• "Show me your plan first." Add it to the end of the prompt so you see what it intends to do before it does it.

It's also worth being clear about what this is. Claude is doing the reading and the typing. It isn't your accountant. Whether something is deductible, and how GST should be treated for your situation, is still a question for your accountant or bookkeeper. What you're handing them is a tidy spreadsheet instead of a shoebox.

Where to go from here

The Check these tab is the habit worth taking away from today. Any time you give Claude a job with a lot of items, ask it to separate the ones it's sure about from the ones it isn't, and tell you why. It turns "check everything" into "check the short list", and that idea works well beyond receipts.

Start with one small batch. Check the flagged ones, spot-check the rest, and see how it went. Then do the next batch.

Missed yesterday? Day 6: Appraisal prep in 2 minutes

Every prompt from the series is on my free prompts page, with a new one each day as the episodes go up, ready to copy.