Make your expense report file itself.
The flight confirmation is in your email. The client lunch is on your calendar. The hotel receipt arrived three days later. They already tell most of the story your expense report wants you to type again. Build a tool that puts that story together and does the filing.
Try it now
Copy the prompt into your AI tool of choice, then answer its questions as they come.
Paste it into any AI chat to start. For most people, this is all you need.
Everything on this page in one paste: the prompt plus the full plan, every step and what to check. Use it for longer moves, to plan ahead, to share with a colleague, or if your AI can't open links.
How it goes
What the AI will do
- Finds likely expenses in travel plans, purchases, email and messages, then builds a tool that gathers the supporting details for your existing expense system.
- Accepts a receipt photo or rough note, applies your company’s policies and project codes, and files authorized reports through a verified connection.
What to have ready
- Your existing expense system and whatever access is available to travel, purchase and policy records.
- A receipt photo or a rough description when an expense is missing from the records.
Where you come in
- Resolve only the missing details that matter, such as a lunch’s business purpose or an ambiguous project.
- Confirm the filing rules and review a real prepared report; authorize submission or a clearly bounded rule for future submissions.
What you'll get
A reusable expense tool that detects and prepares expenses, alerts you when they are ready and verifies authorized filing. Where submission access is unavailable, you receive the completed reports and attachments ready for import, with filing clearly marked unfinished.
You're done when
The tool finds expenses, accepts a photo or rough note, prepares policy-checked entries and has demonstrated verified authorized filing in your existing system. If submission or recurring access is missing, completed reports and the tested tool are delivered with the uncompleted filing or automation step named.
These are general instructions, not a description of this user's particular AI system, tools, access, or circumstances. Adapt the method to the user's goal and the capabilities you can actually use, while preserving the activity's essential sequence, review points, and intended result. ### Start with the activity and the user's context Read the complete activity and guide the user through it. Use the activity prompt yourself; the user does not need to paste it again. Keep the responsibilities of the user, the AI, and any colleague clear. Begin with what the user has already supplied. Establish the intended result and resolve missing context through focused questions when needed. Work within the activity's stated scope, permissions, required confirmations, and stopping points, including any deliberate order for introducing information. Make progress with the available information and reasonable, clearly identified assumptions where the activity allows them. ### Check the capabilities needed for this work Inspect relevant available tools, connectors, and data. Use small, relevant, non-destructive checks to establish whether necessary access or a capability actually works. Naming a product does not establish access to it. Let this activity determine what needs checking; do not impose a universal preliminary questionnaire or a full system audit. When useful access is missing: - Explain what you cannot reach and how that material would help. - Investigate practical setup, connection, export, or other access alternatives before asking the user to gather material or troubleshoot. - If progress depends on access, request only the specific user action or permission needed to enable it or provide the material another way. Continue useful independent work while awaiting the response. - Offer to walk the user through an export or upload. Welcome files, links, copied text, rough notes, or an interview as supported by your system and the activity, and use the best available route. If the missing access is optional, continue with what is available. ### Ask focused questions and respect the answers Ask questions only when necessary to complete the work well or satisfy the activity's required review points. Build on answers already supplied. Ask one question at a time, or a small group of closely related questions. Wait on work that depends on the answer, and continue useful work that does not. Explain unfamiliar language with examples where helpful. Confirm answers or decisions you supply on the user's behalf before treating them as the user's final answers or decisions. This does not require separate approval of every sourced finding; follow the activity's specific review requirements. ### Keep evidence and independent contributions distinct Distinguish evidence, inference, and missing information. Check your work against the source material. Use independent agents when your system actually supports delegation and independent investigation or review would improve the work: - Give each agent a bounded brief and the context appropriate to its role. - Keep discovery independent until synthesis where the activity requires it. Preserve any requirement for the user or colleagues to contribute before seeing other explanations. - Follow the activity's stated fallback and any required confirmation when independent agents or fresh contexts are unavailable. Preserve reviewer isolation where required; describe shared-context or sequential passes accurately. ### Produce, check, and revise the result Do the substantive investigation and production. Carry the activity through to the most complete, usable result within its scope, rather than ending with a plan or handing the main work back to the user. When missing information does not prevent useful work, proceed with clearly identified assumptions where the activity permits them. Check the result against the activity's completion criteria. At each substantive delivery, state what is complete and any material unfinished work, assumptions, helpful missing information, and remaining uncertainty. Explain how these affect what the user can use, and help the user revise the result. Preserve the activity's stopping point. Do not turn a rehearsal, investigation, or test-design activity into execution that the user has not authorized. ### Find the expenses before I have to remember them Build a tool that minimizes my work in filing expenses. It should proactively find likely expenses, collect receipts and context, accept photos or rough notes for anything missing, prepare accurate entries for my existing expense system and submit them when authorized. Alert me when an expense or report is ready, and ask only for unresolved details that affect filing. Inspect and try access to my existing expense system and relevant email, calendar and messages, including WhatsApp where accessible. Search travel confirmations, flight changes, hotel bookings and folios, meal receipts, meeting invitations, vendor invoices, order confirmations, subscription notices and messages about purchases for work. Use dates, destinations, merchants, attendees and project names to join related records. Search project records and relevant meeting transcripts for business purpose and current project or client codes. Use these findings to assemble trips and purchases, rather than asking me to reconstruct each expense. A calendar lunch or booked flight suggests an expense; it does not establish a paid amount or completed trip. Distinguish planned events, completed purchases, cancelled bookings, refunds and reimbursements already recorded. Link each candidate to its original evidence and any unresolved fields. If the volume is large, divide discovery by trip or date window with explicit source coverage and deliverables; use agents when useful, then reconcile candidates and duplicates centrally. Use sequential bounded passes otherwise. ### Learn the actual filing rules and access Find the authoritative travel and expense policies, their effective dates, project and cost-centre lists, required fields, receipt rules and examples of accepted reports. Read relevant finance guidance and rejection or correction messages to understand the process. Identify meal limits, required attendee and business-purpose details, currency treatment, tax fields, payment methods, corporate-card reconciliation, reporting deadlines and exception routes only where the policy or system makes them relevant. Later policy changes need evidence that they apply to the expense date. An old accepted report does not overrule current policy. Inspect the expense system's actual supported read, draft, attachment, import and submission capabilities. Consult current official documentation for that system and the integrations being used. Check small reads and non-submitting draft operations where available. Verify whether recurring discovery, persistent storage, receipt-photo intake and notifications can run in the proposed environment. Investigate practical setup and build the configuration yourself before requesting a specific connection or administrator action. Offer a concise access request explaining what read-only discovery enables and what additional access actual filing needs. If direct submission is unavailable, inspect whether an import or supported interface can carry completed entries and attachments. Exports can support a useful first report and local tool; they do not establish a live feed. State any missing capability and its effect on the promised result. ### Build the intake and reconciliation tool Create the actual tool in the available environment and integrate it with the existing expense workflow. It should: - Refresh connected sources at the cadence we choose, retain its progress and show the freshness of each source. - Group records into candidate expenses, trips or reports using the expense system's actual structure. Match booking confirmations with final receipts, folios and payment evidence; reconcile cancellations, refunds and changed bookings. - Accept a receipt photo, forwarded record or rough note through a convenient supported route. Extract merchant, date, amount, currency, tax and other required fields; retain the original image or record. Check extraction against the visible source and flag unreadable or conflicting values. - Enrich candidates with evidenced business purpose, attendees, projects and payment method. Keep guesses distinct. Search related records to fill a gap before asking me, and never manufacture a receipt or treat an approximate amount in a note as a confirmed charge. - Check requirements against the applicable policy and distinguish ready items, items needing one answer, and exceptions requiring the established review route. Preserve original amounts and the source and method of any required currency conversion. - Detect duplicates across inboxes, uploads, corporate-card items, previously prepared entries and the destination system. Keep stable expense references so repeated ingestion or interrupted runs do not produce additional claims. Build a concise review view with the supporting receipt, amount and currency, business purpose, project, policy treatment and exact missing information. Ask the smallest useful question when needed; retain my answer for this item and reusable preferences only where appropriate. A missing receipt should follow the actual company's declaration or exception process, if one exists. A photo or rough note must be easy to add later and reconcile with an existing candidate. ### Prepare and file with the least human work Agree on the alert destination and cadence. Notify me when items are genuinely ready to file or when one answer would unblock them. Group related questions so I can handle a trip in one brief interaction, rather than receiving an alert for every merchant. Avoid repeated unchanged alerts. Prepare the actual report and attachments in the existing system or its supported import format. Show the report total, destination, items, exceptions and any certification or commitment submission entails. Use filing authority I have already supplied. Where it is absent, obtain approval for this report or a concrete standing rule defining eligible expenses, limits, exception treatment and submission timing. Do not make a personal certification whose truth has not been established. Submit reports that satisfy the authorization. Verify the destination's actual report ID, accepted items, totals, attachments and submission status. Distinguish saved draft, submitted, approved and reimbursed; submission does not prove reimbursement. Record outcomes, and inspect the destination before retrying an uncertain operation. Return failed or rejected items to a specific repair path, correct what the records allow and ask me only for the remaining consequential detail. If a supported submission path is unavailable, deliver completed entries and receipts in the verified usable format and identify the precise remaining import or submit action. That is prepared expense work, not filed expenses. Do not stop at instructions for me to fill in the forms myself. ### Test the full cycle and activate it Use representative records and controlled tests for a flight, final hotel folio, meal, work purchase, receipt photo and approximate note. Include a cancellation or refund, duplicate receipt, missing required field, policy exception and interrupted submission. Check extracted amounts, currency, totals, attachment fidelity, business purpose and destination fields against the original sources and policy. Give an independent reviewer a bounded sample of prepared entries, receipts and applicable rules, without your explanation of the implementation. Ask them to find unsupported fields, duplicate claims and policy errors. If independence is unavailable, use a separate review pass and say so. Repair findings and recheck affected cases. Use a sandbox or non-submitting draft for tests unless an actual report is explicitly authorized; test fixtures must not become reimbursement claims. Demonstrate the route from discovered purchase and uploaded photo to complete report, ready alert and verified authorized submission or clearly identified preparation-only output. Enable recurring operation within the agreed authority and verify the first run and next trigger. Deliver the working intake link or location, report and filing receipts, outstanding questions, coverage status and simple instructions for adding an expense or pausing the tool. Essential missing access means the workflow is partially complete; provide the built portion and exact remaining setup rather than calling it automatic filing. These instructions were written in September 2026 using the frontier models available at the time. You may now have better tools or models, or restrictions that make some tasks harder. Your AI should adapt to the tools and access you actually have and find the best available way to help. Everything here is a starting suggestion for you and your AI, not a proven best practice for every setup. Feel free to rewrite any of it to better meet your needs.
View full AI instructions
Make your expense report file itself.
What the AI will do
- Finds likely expenses in travel plans, purchases, email and messages, then builds a tool that gathers the supporting details for your existing expense system.
- Accepts a receipt photo or rough note, applies your company’s policies and project codes, and files authorized reports through a verified connection.
What you can provide
- Your existing expense system and whatever access is available to travel, purchase and policy records.
- A receipt photo or a rough description when an expense is missing from the records.
Where you'll take part
- Resolve only the missing details that matter, such as a lunch’s business purpose or an ambiguous project.
- Confirm the filing rules and review a real prepared report; authorize submission or a clearly bounded rule for future submissions.
What you'll get
A reusable expense tool that detects and prepares expenses, alerts you when they are ready and verifies authorized filing. Where submission access is unavailable, you receive the completed reports and attachments ready for import, with filing clearly marked unfinished.
Activity context
The flight confirmation is in your email. The client lunch is on your calendar. The hotel receipt arrived three days later. They already tell most of the story your expense report wants you to type again. Build a tool that puts that story together and does the filing.
For the user
Tell the AI which expense system you use. Existing records are enough to begin; a receipt photo or “lunch with the client on Tuesday, about $80” is useful too. The AI will investigate, build and test the workflow, asking you only for details it cannot reliably establish and the authority needed to submit.
Guidance for the AI
These are general instructions, not a description of this user's particular AI system, tools, access, or circumstances. Adapt the method to the user's goal and the capabilities you can actually use, while preserving the activity's essential sequence, review points, and intended result.
Start with the activity and the user's context
Read the complete activity and guide the user through it. Use the activity prompt yourself; the user does not need to paste it again. Keep the responsibilities of the user, the AI, and any colleague clear.
Begin with what the user has already supplied. Establish the intended result and resolve missing context through focused questions when needed. Work within the activity's stated scope, permissions, required confirmations, and stopping points, including any deliberate order for introducing information. Make progress with the available information and reasonable, clearly identified assumptions where the activity allows them.
Check the capabilities needed for this work
Inspect relevant available tools, connectors, and data. Use small, relevant, non-destructive checks to establish whether necessary access or a capability actually works. Naming a product does not establish access to it. Let this activity determine what needs checking; do not impose a universal preliminary questionnaire or a full system audit.
When useful access is missing:
- Explain what you cannot reach and how that material would help.
- Investigate practical setup, connection, export, or other access alternatives before asking the user to gather material or troubleshoot.
- If progress depends on access, request only the specific user action or permission needed to enable it or provide the material another way. Continue useful independent work while awaiting the response.
- Offer to walk the user through an export or upload. Welcome files, links, copied text, rough notes, or an interview as supported by your system and the activity, and use the best available route. If the missing access is optional, continue with what is available.
Ask focused questions and respect the answers
Ask questions only when necessary to complete the work well or satisfy the activity's required review points. Build on answers already supplied. Ask one question at a time, or a small group of closely related questions. Wait on work that depends on the answer, and continue useful work that does not. Explain unfamiliar language with examples where helpful.
Confirm answers or decisions you supply on the user's behalf before treating them as the user's final answers or decisions. This does not require separate approval of every sourced finding; follow the activity's specific review requirements.
Keep evidence and independent contributions distinct
Distinguish evidence, inference, and missing information. Check your work against the source material.
Use independent agents when your system actually supports delegation and independent investigation or review would improve the work:
- Give each agent a bounded brief and the context appropriate to its role.
- Keep discovery independent until synthesis where the activity requires it. Preserve any requirement for the user or colleagues to contribute before seeing other explanations.
- Follow the activity's stated fallback and any required confirmation when independent agents or fresh contexts are unavailable. Preserve reviewer isolation where required; describe shared-context or sequential passes accurately.
Produce, check, and revise the result
Do the substantive investigation and production. Carry the activity through to the most complete, usable result within its scope, rather than ending with a plan or handing the main work back to the user. When missing information does not prevent useful work, proceed with clearly identified assumptions where the activity permits them.
Check the result against the activity's completion criteria. At each substantive delivery, state what is complete and any material unfinished work, assumptions, helpful missing information, and remaining uncertainty. Explain how these affect what the user can use, and help the user revise the result.
Preserve the activity's stopping point. Do not turn a rehearsal, investigation, or test-design activity into execution that the user has not authorized.
Your AI prompt
Find the expenses before I have to remember them
Build a tool that minimizes my work in filing expenses. It should proactively find likely expenses, collect receipts and context, accept photos or rough notes for anything missing, prepare accurate entries for my existing expense system and submit them when authorized. Alert me when an expense or report is ready, and ask only for unresolved details that affect filing.
Inspect and try access to my existing expense system and relevant email, calendar and messages, including WhatsApp where accessible. Search travel confirmations, flight changes, hotel bookings and folios, meal receipts, meeting invitations, vendor invoices, order confirmations, subscription notices and messages about purchases for work. Use dates, destinations, merchants, attendees and project names to join related records. Search project records and relevant meeting transcripts for business purpose and current project or client codes. Use these findings to assemble trips and purchases, rather than asking me to reconstruct each expense.
A calendar lunch or booked flight suggests an expense; it does not establish a paid amount or completed trip. Distinguish planned events, completed purchases, cancelled bookings, refunds and reimbursements already recorded. Link each candidate to its original evidence and any unresolved fields. If the volume is large, divide discovery by trip or date window with explicit source coverage and deliverables; use agents when useful, then reconcile candidates and duplicates centrally. Use sequential bounded passes otherwise.
Learn the actual filing rules and access
Find the authoritative travel and expense policies, their effective dates, project and cost-centre lists, required fields, receipt rules and examples of accepted reports. Read relevant finance guidance and rejection or correction messages to understand the process. Identify meal limits, required attendee and business-purpose details, currency treatment, tax fields, payment methods, corporate-card reconciliation, reporting deadlines and exception routes only where the policy or system makes them relevant. Later policy changes need evidence that they apply to the expense date. An old accepted report does not overrule current policy.
Inspect the expense system's actual supported read, draft, attachment, import and submission capabilities. Consult current official documentation for that system and the integrations being used. Check small reads and non-submitting draft operations where available. Verify whether recurring discovery, persistent storage, receipt-photo intake and notifications can run in the proposed environment.
Investigate practical setup and build the configuration yourself before requesting a specific connection or administrator action. Offer a concise access request explaining what read-only discovery enables and what additional access actual filing needs. If direct submission is unavailable, inspect whether an import or supported interface can carry completed entries and attachments. Exports can support a useful first report and local tool; they do not establish a live feed. State any missing capability and its effect on the promised result.
Build the intake and reconciliation tool
Create the actual tool in the available environment and integrate it with the existing expense workflow. It should:
- Refresh connected sources at the cadence we choose, retain its progress and show the freshness of each source.
- Group records into candidate expenses, trips or reports using the expense system's actual structure. Match booking confirmations with final receipts, folios and payment evidence; reconcile cancellations, refunds and changed bookings.
- Accept a receipt photo, forwarded record or rough note through a convenient supported route. Extract merchant, date, amount, currency, tax and other required fields; retain the original image or record. Check extraction against the visible source and flag unreadable or conflicting values.
- Enrich candidates with evidenced business purpose, attendees, projects and payment method. Keep guesses distinct. Search related records to fill a gap before asking me, and never manufacture a receipt or treat an approximate amount in a note as a confirmed charge.
- Check requirements against the applicable policy and distinguish ready items, items needing one answer, and exceptions requiring the established review route. Preserve original amounts and the source and method of any required currency conversion.
- Detect duplicates across inboxes, uploads, corporate-card items, previously prepared entries and the destination system. Keep stable expense references so repeated ingestion or interrupted runs do not produce additional claims.
Build a concise review view with the supporting receipt, amount and currency, business purpose, project, policy treatment and exact missing information. Ask the smallest useful question when needed; retain my answer for this item and reusable preferences only where appropriate. A missing receipt should follow the actual company's declaration or exception process, if one exists. A photo or rough note must be easy to add later and reconcile with an existing candidate.
Prepare and file with the least human work
Agree on the alert destination and cadence. Notify me when items are genuinely ready to file or when one answer would unblock them. Group related questions so I can handle a trip in one brief interaction, rather than receiving an alert for every merchant. Avoid repeated unchanged alerts.
Prepare the actual report and attachments in the existing system or its supported import format. Show the report total, destination, items, exceptions and any certification or commitment submission entails. Use filing authority I have already supplied. Where it is absent, obtain approval for this report or a concrete standing rule defining eligible expenses, limits, exception treatment and submission timing. Do not make a personal certification whose truth has not been established.
Submit reports that satisfy the authorization. Verify the destination's actual report ID, accepted items, totals, attachments and submission status. Distinguish saved draft, submitted, approved and reimbursed; submission does not prove reimbursement. Record outcomes, and inspect the destination before retrying an uncertain operation. Return failed or rejected items to a specific repair path, correct what the records allow and ask me only for the remaining consequential detail.
If a supported submission path is unavailable, deliver completed entries and receipts in the verified usable format and identify the precise remaining import or submit action. That is prepared expense work, not filed expenses. Do not stop at instructions for me to fill in the forms myself.
Test the full cycle and activate it
Use representative records and controlled tests for a flight, final hotel folio, meal, work purchase, receipt photo and approximate note. Include a cancellation or refund, duplicate receipt, missing required field, policy exception and interrupted submission. Check extracted amounts, currency, totals, attachment fidelity, business purpose and destination fields against the original sources and policy.
Give an independent reviewer a bounded sample of prepared entries, receipts and applicable rules, without your explanation of the implementation. Ask them to find unsupported fields, duplicate claims and policy errors. If independence is unavailable, use a separate review pass and say so. Repair findings and recheck affected cases. Use a sandbox or non-submitting draft for tests unless an actual report is explicitly authorized; test fixtures must not become reimbursement claims.
Demonstrate the route from discovered purchase and uploaded photo to complete report, ready alert and verified authorized submission or clearly identified preparation-only output. Enable recurring operation within the agreed authority and verify the first run and next trigger. Deliver the working intake link or location, report and filing receipts, outstanding questions, coverage status and simple instructions for adding an expense or pausing the tool. Essential missing access means the workflow is partially complete; provide the built portion and exact remaining setup rather than calling it automatic filing.
Done when
The tool finds expenses, accepts a photo or rough note, prepares policy-checked entries and has demonstrated verified authorized filing in your existing system. If submission or recurring access is missing, completed reports and the tested tool are delivered with the uncompleted filing or automation step named.
These instructions were written in September 2026 using the frontier models available at the time. You may now have better tools or models, or restrictions that make some tasks harder. Your AI should adapt to the tools and access you actually have and find the best available way to help. Everything here is a starting suggestion for you and your AI, not a proven best practice for every setup. Feel free to rewrite any of it to better meet your needs.
These instructions were written in September 2026 using the frontier models available at the time. You may now have better tools or models, or restrictions that make some tasks harder. Your AI should adapt to the tools and access you actually have and find the best available way to help. Everything here is a starting suggestion for you and your AI, not a proven best practice for every setup. Feel free to rewrite any of it to better meet your needs.