I am a bookkeeper. What should I ask clients to send me about their AI work?
Ask for four things monthly: the job list for the period (client, invoice, amount), the delivery record link for each billed job, the AI tool costs with their receipts (passes, subscriptions, per-call charges), and any agent spend summaries. With those four, AI income and AI costs reconcile like any other line of business.
Scope: an organisation guide for bookkeeping intake, not bookkeeping or tax advice. Categorisation and treatment follow your professional standards and the client's jurisdiction.
AI-assisted work creates two bookkeeping headaches. On the income side, invoices reference deliverables produced partly by software, and the supporting trail is a chat thread nobody can file. On the cost side, AI spending arrives as many small charges across tools, passes, and per-call billing, easy to miss and hard to attribute to jobs.
The request list fixes both by borrowing the client's own delivery system. A client who delivers recorded work already holds the job index: each job with its invoice, its handover link, and its acceptance date. That index is the income trail in one file. The cost trail is the mirror: the AI spend for the period, exported or listed, with the big items named (the monthly pass, Day Pass days bought for disputes or audits, framework subscriptions).
Ask monthly, in the same message every time, and file the answers by period. The habit pays off at year end and at any review: a client's AI income is supported job by job, and their AI costs are complete rather than reconstructed from card statements. The exact wording below is written to be pasted into your intake or monthly checklist email.
Template: the monthly AI records request (paste-ready)
"For this month's file, please send: 1. Job list: each job billed or delivered this month, with client name, invoice number, amount, and delivery date. 2. Delivery records: the handover or record link for each job on the list. 3. AI costs: every AI tool charge this month (subscriptions, passes, per-call or top-up charges), with amounts and dates; a statement export highlighting them is fine. 4. Agent spend: any summaries of spending by AI agents acting for the business, including refunds or credits. If any item does not exist yet, write 'none' beside it rather than leaving it blank."
Worked example
Item 2's link, in the form clients hold it: https://zambo.dev/handover/45434a17-4afc-486a-9646-e689bcee4297 is a delivery record with steps and the client's acceptance, the object that supports an invoice line without any chat archaeology. A month of these, indexed, is a clean income file.
Frequently asked questions
My clients do not keep job indexes. What is the minimum viable ask?
Items 1 and 3, the job list and the AI costs, in any format, monthly. Even a plain list transforms year-end from reconstruction into filing, and most clients add the record links once they see how little the list asks of them.
Should clients send me their actual AI chats?
No. Chats are working material, bulky and full of client data you do not need. The delivery record and the cost summary carry everything the books require; keep the file lean on purpose.
How should AI tool costs be categorised?
That is a professional judgement under your standards and the client's situation, and this page deliberately does not categorise. The intake list's job is completeness: every charge identified, dated, and attributable, so the categorisation you choose rests on a full set.
By Brennan Zambo, founder of Zambo.
Last verified: 2026-10-17.
Try a handover
A handover gives your client one proof link with verifiable receipts to review, then Accept or Flag.
try it: say 'use zambo to hand this over to <client>' in your ai