freelancer books vat

Bookkeeping is a chore that freelancers often delay until tax season becomes a crisis. This skill bridges the gap between messy bank statement exports and the organized data your accountant actually needs.

What it does

• Standardizes exports by converting various bank CSV or PDF statement formats into a unified schema.
• Automates categorization using a rules-based engine to map counterparties to specific expense accounts.
• Estimates VAT for each quarter based on user-defined rates and deductibility percentages.
• Detects subscriptions by identifying recurring weekly or monthly payments to highlight potential savings.
• Generates dashboards including an Excel ledger and an HTML summary for quick financial health checks.

How it works

1. Inspect files using the inspect command to map column headers and validate date formats across different bank exports.
2. Define rules in a JSON file to handle recurring merchants, setting their VAT rates and business-use percentages.
3. Execute build to merge statements, deduplicate transactions, and generate the books.xlsx and books.html outputs.
4. Review and refine the generated list of unclassified items to update the rules for the next run.

Frameworks & tools

The system uses a standalone Python 3.8 script requiring only the standard library. It operates entirely offline for data privacy, processing CSV and PDF inputs to output JSON, Excel, and HTML formats.

Why this beats prompting it yourself

Manual prompting often fails at deduplication and consistent categorization across hundreds of rows. This skill uses a persistent rules engine, ensuring that a merchant classified once stays classified correctly across different quarters and accounts.

Use cases

• Preparing quarterly VAT estimates for a small business or freelancer.
• Auditing annual bank statements to identify unused software subscriptions.
• Cleaning up mixed personal and business transactions for an accountant.
• Converting bank PDF statements into a structured ledger for tax filing.

Known limitations

VAT calculations are estimates based on payment dates, not invoice dates. The script requires Python 3.8 or higher and does not support direct API connections to banks.