What records should I hand my bookkeeper each month for AI-assisted work?
A handover brings the recorded AI work and its verifiable receipts into one proof link. Review the evidence behind each claim, check what was and was not observed, then Accept or Flag.
Scope: an organisation guide for the handoff, not bookkeeping or tax advice. Categories, treatments, and filings are your bookkeeper's professional calls.
Bookkeepers do not struggle with AI work's complexity; they struggle with its identifiability. The income arrives as ordinary invoices whose AI content is invisible; the costs arrive as small, oddly named charges scattered across cards; and the questions land months later, when the answers require archaeology. The monthly envelope exists so the AI slice of the business is identified while identification is still free.
The job index extract does the income side: the month's billed AI-assisted jobs, each with its delivery record a click away, so any figure can be walked to dated, accepted work. The cost list does the expense side with the discipline of completeness over size: a $0.99 Day Pass bought to cover a dispute day is exactly the kind of charge that vanishes from memory and matters in aggregate, and the list's rule is every charge, dated, grouped, totalled. The unaccepted note is the item bookkeepers ask for most and receive least: work delivered, not yet decided or paid, named monthly, because accrual questions and bad-debt questions both start there.
Send it on a fixed day and keep your copy in the month folder; four envelopes are the quarterly pull's skeleton, and twelve are the accountant package's spine. The monthly habit is the smallest unit of the entire record system in this file, and the one whose absence is most expensive to reverse.
Template: the monthly bookkeeper envelope
Send on the same day each month. Item 1, job index extract: the month's billed AI-assisted jobs (client, invoice, amount, date, delivery link, acceptance state). Item 2, AI cost list: every charge in the month, dated, grouped by tool, totalled. Item 3, agent spend: totals for agent transactions for the business, refunds and credits noted. Item 4, unaccepted and unpaid: deliverables sent, decision or payment outstanding, one line each with ages. Item 5, unusual items: at most three lines (a dispute opened, a tool abandoned, a large one-off). Format: one message or one folder, index first; file the sent copy with the month's records.
Worked example
An Item 1 row resolves to a record like https://zambo.dev/handover/45434a17-4afc-486a-9646-e689bcee4297 , accepted, dates visible. A bookkeeper sampling one row a month builds, over a year, a justified confidence in the whole envelope, which is how the monthly habit converts into year-end speed.
Frequently asked questions
My bookkeeper has never asked for delivery links. Should I still send them?
Yes. The links cost nothing in the envelope and answer the first future question (from the bookkeeper, an accountant, or a reviewer) instantly. Records sent before they are requested are a courtesy; records requested before they exist are a crisis.
What if a month had no AI-assisted work?
Send the envelope anyway, marked as a nil month for AI work, with the cost list showing any standing charges. A nil month on record is information; a missing month is a gap someone must later explain.
Our bookkeeper prefers a spreadsheet. Does the format matter?
The envelope's contents matter; its container is negotiable. Send the items in the bookkeeper's preferred shape, keep the index's links live inside it, and file your copy identically. Systems survive by fitting the reader's habits, not by winning format arguments.
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