What should I send my accountant from a year of AI work?
Send four things in one folder: the year's job index (every billed job, client, invoice, amount, date), the delivery record link behind each invoice, the complete list of AI costs with dates (passes, subscriptions, per-call charges), and any agent spend summaries. Review the receipt and actual deliverable before accepting a handover.
Scope: general information about organising the handoff, not tax advice. Your accountant decides treatment and categories under your jurisdiction's rules.
The accountant's problem with AI work is identification, not complexity. Income lines reference deliverables produced partly by software, with the supporting material scattered across chats. Cost lines arrive as dozens of small, cryptically named charges. Either can be handled; what cannot be handled cheaply is a year delivered as raw material with no index.
The job index solves the income side in one artefact: a row per billed job, with the delivery record a click away, so any figure can be walked back to work that happened, in the period claimed, accepted by the client on a recorded date. The cost list solves the expense side the same way: every AI charge of the year, dated and totalled, including the easy-to-miss ones (a $0.99 Day Pass bought for a dispute day is a business cost with a story your accountant should hear from the list, not discover on a statement).
Assemble it in January from the quarterly habit if you kept it, or from invoices downward if you did not, marking the rows whose records are missing. Send it as one package with a one-page cover note naming anything unusual: a large dispute, a client who never paid, a tool abandoned mid-year. Accountants reward the package visibly, in turnaround time and in the quality of the questions they ask you instead of the volume.
Template: the accountant package
Cover note: year, preparer, three unusual items at most, each in one line. Part 1, job index: one row per billed job (client, invoice, amount, date, delivery link, acceptance date). Part 2, delivery records: the links themselves, plus exports for any job whose client relationship ended. Part 3, AI cost list: every charge, dated, grouped by tool, totalled. Part 4, agent spend: summaries of agent spending for the business, refunds and credits noted. Format: one folder or one PDF with the index first; file your copy with the year's records.
Worked example
A Part 1 row's link opens like https://zambo.dev/handover/45434a17-4afc-486a-9646-e689bcee4297 : the job, its steps, and the client's recorded acceptance with dates. An accountant sampling three rows gets, in minutes, the confidence that the index describes real, dated work.
Frequently asked questions
My accountant has never asked for delivery records. Why send them?
Because the first time anyone asks, an authority, a buyer's diligence, your own dispute, the answer should already exist as a link in the index. Sending them costs nothing now and converts a future scramble into a forward.
Should I include the AI chats themselves?
No. Chats are working material: bulky, sensitive, and useless for accounts. The index, the delivery records, and the cost list are the financial story; keep the package to what money questions touch.
What if the year was partly unrecorded?
Mark the rows. An index that honestly marks its gaps lets your accountant plan around them, and the marked index becomes next year's first exhibit for why the recording habit changed.
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