Most people assembling an accounting workflow are joining five stages that usually live in five different tools. ExpenseBot covers the first four and hands the fifth to your accounting package — and every stage is callable from an AI assistant or an automation platform, so you can wire it however you already work.
The five stages
1. Capture. Receipts arrive without anyone re-typing them: scanned from Gmail, photographed, dropped in a Slack channel, saved to Drive, or forwarded by email.
2. Maintain. Rows get a category and, where it matters, a tag for the client, project, or trip. Expenses can be split, corrected, or grouped after the fact.
3. Report. Build the period's report on demand, or have one built automatically for a chosen tag on a chosen day each month.
4. Hand off. Send the report to your accounting package. From an assistant, ExpenseBot posts directly to Zoho Books — a two-step call that proposes the posting and then posts only what you confirm — and reports the real push status rather than leaving you to assume it landed. QuickBooks, Xero, Wave, Sage, and FreeAgent are handled by the in-app accounting integrations and export formats rather than by that assistant call, so use the app for those.
5. Bill. Turn a report into a client invoice when the expenses are rebillable, with any advance the client already paid deducted.
What makes it composable
The whole surface is available over MCP, the open standard for giving AI assistants and agents access to external tools. One connection serves Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, a desktop client, or a custom agent your firm already runs — what changes is the role you give it. Automation platforms like Zapier and Make can drive the same actions from triggers instead of prompts.
That means you are not adopting a closed pipeline. You are adding a stage that speaks a standard protocol, so it fits whatever else you have already assembled.
Where the data lives
The ledger is a Google Sheet in your own Drive. Automation that writes into a vendor's database makes you dependent on that vendor; automation that writes into a sheet you own leaves you with the asset if you ever stop. That difference matters most in exactly the situation where automation is worth building — when you intend to run it for years.
What stays a human decision
Automation should not quietly move money or send documents on your behalf:
- Accounting pushes are user-initiated, and the push status is reported back so failures are visible rather than silent.
- Client invoices are two-phase: the assistant prepares the invoice and shows exact totals, and it is only created after you explicitly confirm. Creating it produces the document — sending it to your client is always a separate, deliberate step.
- Tag suggestions are proposals you accept, not silent rewrites of your data.
Where it stops
ExpenseBot maintains the expense and income ledger and hands it off. It does not keep your general ledger, run payroll, or file your return. It feeds the accounting package where those things belong.