Recipes
Concrete prompts that work well in the Books AI chat — bookkeeping, lookups, and clean-ups.
These are example prompts you can paste into the chat. They map to the same operations described in Posting transactions, just spoken to the AI instead of clicked into the form.
Bookkeeping (the AI proposes; you click Post)
Operating expenses
Record $1,200 office rent paid from checking today.
Pay the $89 internet bill from checking, ref INV-2024-08.
Book $42.50 of office supplies on the company Visa.
Sales and revenue
Record a $2,500 cash sale today, deposited to checking.
Invoice Acme Corp $5,000 for consulting, net-30. Reference INV-1042.
Record $1,860 received from Acme against INV-1042.
Payroll and contractors
Pay Jane $4,500 net salary from checking — $1,000 of withholding goes to the payroll tax liability account.
Pay $1,800 to contractor Mark from checking, ref Stripe-payout-2024-04-11.
Loans and capital
Record a $50,000 SBA loan deposited into checking.
Make a $1,127 loan payment — $986 principal, $141 interest, from checking.
Owner contributed $10,000 from personal savings to the business checking account.
Transfers
Move $25,000 from checking to the money market account.
Adjustments
Record $200 in depreciation on the laptop, against accumulated depreciation.
Lookups (read-only)
What were our five biggest expenses last month?
Show me every transaction tagged with reference "INV-1042".
Did we already record the Stripe payout for April 11th?
What's our current balance on the Visa credit card account?
(For account balances the AI will summarize from recent activity — for
authoritative numbers, check the Account ledger view in
/dash/accounts/{id}.)
Clean-up (the AI proposes; you click Delete)
Find and delete the duplicate Stripe payout entry for April 5th.
The $1,200 rent entry I posted twice — delete the duplicate (keep the earlier one).
The AI will use searchTransactions to find candidates and surface a
Delete transaction card with the exact entry it intends to remove.
Read the card — date, memo, line count, total — before clicking
Delete. Once posted, deletions are recorded in the
audit log but the entry itself is
gone.
Patterns that don't work yet
| You might want… | The AI can't… | What to do instead |
|---|---|---|
| "Edit the memo on entry abc123." | …propose updates yet. Only Create and Delete. | Edit it manually via the journal page's pencil icon. |
| "Create a new account called 1015 Petty cash." | …touch the chart of accounts. | Go to /dash/accounts and add it. |
| "Generate my income statement for Q1." | …run reports. | Open /dash/reports/income-statement and pick the date range. |
| "Attach receipt.pdf to that entry." | …read or attach files. | Use the paperclip on the transaction form. |
| "Lock the books through March." | …set period locks. | Set it from /dash/settings. |
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