What records do I need for taxes when clients pay me for AI-assisted work?
Keep three trails that agree with each other: the income trail (contracts, invoices, payment records), the work trail (the receipt and handover for each job an invoice covers), and the expense trail (tool and pass costs). Match them by job, so any figure on a return can be walked back to the work that earned it.
Scope: general information about organising records, not tax advice. Deductions, categories, and filing duties depend on your situation and jurisdiction; your accountant or tax authority guidance governs.
AI-assisted income is ordinary income with an unusual work trail. The money side is familiar: the contract or engagement message, the invoice, and the payment record, kept per client per job. What AI work changes is the middle: the deliverable was produced partly by software, and the questions that follow, from a client, an auditor, or your own accountant, are about what the work was and when it happened.
That is the work trail's job. A handover per job carries the steps, the saved results, the producer labels, and the acceptance date, which together tie the invoice to work that occurred, in the period the invoice claims. Receipts behind the steps recompute publicly, so the trail does not depend on any single platform's history surviving.
The expense trail closes the triangle: the connection's own costs (Day Pass days, the monthly pass, related tools) recorded against the jobs they served. Keep the three trails in one index, one row per job, reviewed quarterly rather than reconstructed annually. The index below is the whole system; it fits on one page because it is maintained a row at a time, when the work happens.
Template: the three-trail job index
One row per job: Job ID | Client | Contract or proposal link | Invoice number and date | Amount and payment date | Handover link | Receipt count | Acceptance date | Tool costs charged to the job | Notes. Quarterly routine (15 minutes): add missing rows, confirm every invoice has a handover, confirm every handover has an invoice or a "not billed" note, file the quarter's expense receipts. Year-end: export the index and the records behind it to storage you control.
Worked example
One row's work trail, opened publicly: invoice line "research brief, delivered and accepted" maps to https://zambo.dev/handover/45434a17-4afc-486a-9646-e689bcee4297 , whose record shows the steps and the client's acceptance decision with its date. That single link is what "walked back to the work" means in practice.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need to disclose to the tax authority that AI did the work?
Filing and disclosure duties are jurisdiction questions this page does not decide. What the records give you, whatever the duty, is the ability to answer accurately: which work, which steps, which tools, which dates, from documents rather than memory.
Are Day Pass and Pass costs business expenses?
They are costs of producing the work, recorded in the expense trail against the jobs they served. Whether and how they are deductible is a question for your accountant under your rules; the trail's job is to make the amounts and dates provable.
How long should I keep these trails?
At least as long as your jurisdiction requires for income records, and as long as your client contracts require for the work records. When in doubt keep the longer period; the index makes storage trivial.
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