Tax season. Just reading those two words probably made your shoulders tense up a little. If you run a small business, you know the drill — digging through bank statements, sorting expenses into categories, trying to remember what that $47 charge from eight months ago was for. It’s tedious, it’s time-consuming, and honestly, it’s the last thing most of us want to be doing.
So this year, I tried something different. I handed most of the work to an AI tool called Claude Code — and I was genuinely blown away by what happened.
A Little Background
Every year here at Solution Sprout, I have to file a Schedule C — that’s the federal form where sole proprietors and single-member LLC owners report their business income and expenses. Pennsylvania has its own version too. Normally, I spend hours manually going through my bank statements, PayPal records, and credit card bills, sorting everything into the right categories, and plugging numbers into spreadsheets and tax forms.
Over the years, I got organized enough to build a spreadsheet template and write out a step-by-step instruction document for myself — mostly because I kept forgetting how I did it the year before. Sound familiar?
What I Did Differently This Year
This time, instead of following my own instructions myself, I let the AI follow them for me.
I set up a simple folder on my computer with three things inside:
- My bank and PayPal statements
- A sample spreadsheet from a previous year (so the AI could see what a finished product looks like)
- My blank spreadsheet template and blank tax forms
Then I gave Claude Code access to that folder and told it to get to work.
Here’s what surprised me: I didn’t even have to explain what to do. By reading through my instruction document and looking at the files, the AI figured out the whole process on its own. It created an 8-step plan, showed it to me for approval, and then got to work.
What the AI Actually Did
Once I gave it the green light, Claude Code went through every transaction across my bank accounts and PayPal — and it didn’t just copy the numbers over. It categorized the expenses on its own. Office supplies went in one bucket, software subscriptions in another, and so on. And it didn’t just categorize my expenses — it actually flagged potential tax issues on its own, like charges that might not be fully deductible and a gap in my statements where recurring monthly subscriptions appeared to be missing.
It then filled out my spreadsheet and even populated the Schedule C tax form PDFs.
Was it perfect? Almost. It put one number in the wrong field on the PDF, and saved the forms in a way that made them hard to edit afterward — so I did end up filling in the final PDFs by hand. But the heavy lifting — all that sorting, categorizing, and calculating — was done for me.
The time I saved? Hours. Genuinely.
What This Means for You
Here’s the thing: you don’t have to be a tech person to use tools like this. If you have organized records and a clear sense of what you’re trying to produce, AI can follow your process just like a very fast, very thorough assistant would.
Think about the repetitive tasks in your own business — the ones you dread or keep putting off. Compiling monthly reports. Sorting through expenses. Summarizing data from multiple sources. These are exactly the kinds of jobs that AI is getting really good at handling.
A few things to keep in mind if you want to try this yourself:
- You’ll need a paid plan. Claude Code requires at least the Claude Pro plan, which runs about $17 a month.
- Back up your files first. Before letting any AI tool work inside a folder on your computer, make a backup copy. It’s a simple step that protects you if anything goes wrong.
- The better your instructions, the better the results. If you already have a documented process — even just rough notes — the AI has something to work from. Garbage in, garbage out, as they used to say.
- One more thing — always check the work. This probably goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway: AI is a helper, not a replacement for your own eyes. Before I filed anything, I went through the numbers myself to make sure everything looked right — and sure enough, I caught a couple of small things that needed fixing. Think of it like having an assistant who’s incredibly fast and hardworking, but still benefits from a quick review before anything goes out the door. The time you save will still be significant, but the final responsibility is yours. A quick spot-check is a small price to pay for hours of work off your plate
The Bottom Line
I went into this as an experiment, honestly not sure what to expect. I came out the other side convinced that AI isn’t just for software developers or tech companies. It’s a real, practical tool that can take the grunt work out of tasks that most small business owners deal with every single year.
If tax prep isn’t your thing, think about what is eating up your time — and ask yourself whether an AI could handle some of it. You might be surprised by the answer.