You are not bad with money. You just have 214 receipts living in your camera roll, your inbox, and the bottom of a tote bag.
The problem was never saving receipts. It's remembering, eight months later, why you bought a $14.87 airport salad, whether that Uber was for the conference or for dinner with your cousin, and which of it your accountant actually needs to see. By the time tax season shows up, the context is gone, and context is the whole game. A receipt without a business purpose is just a piece of paper.
So I built a fix in Muse, Meta's new personal AI agent. I upload a receipt, tell it in one sentence why I spent the money, and it adds the expense to an organized tracker with one of three labels: potential deduction, generally nondeductible, or needs review. One prompt sets the whole thing up. Here's exactly how.
Meet: Muse
Muse launched in September 2026 as Meta's take on an AI agent that does things instead of just answering questions. It can browse the web, work with files, remember what you've told it, and keep working after you close the app. It runs on Muse Spark, Meta's newest model. It's on iOS, Android, and the web at muse.ai, you sign in with your Meta account, and for now it's U.S. only and 18+. It's free with a usage limit, and reviewers have reported paid tiers at $20 and $100 a month if you need more.
The part that matters here: it accepts photos, PDFs, spreadsheets, and CSVs, and it can create XLSX and CSV files that it saves to your Library. A receipt tracker is really just three jobs. Read a photo, apply some rules, and keep a running spreadsheet. Muse can do all three.
Build: paste the prompt
Open a fresh conversation so your tracker gets its own home and doesn't get tangled up with your grocery lists. Then copy this whole thing and send it as your first message. It's long on purpose. The more specific the rules, the less the AI has to guess, and guessing is the last thing you want anywhere near your taxes.
Build me a business expense and potential tax deduction tracker called "My Write-Off Tracker."
I want to upload a receipt, briefly explain why I spent the money, and see the expense added to an organized tracker.
SET UP MY PROFILE
Ask for my tax year, country and state, whether I'm self-employed or an employee, and my business activity. For each business trip, record the destination, dates, business purpose, and any personal days.
CAPTURE EXPENSES
Let me upload receipt photos or screenshots, or enter an expense manually. Extract the merchant, date, amount, currency, and tax and tip when available. Ask me to confirm unclear information instead of guessing.
For each expense, save:
- Receipt
- Merchant and date
- Amount and currency
- Category and associated trip
- Business purpose
- Business-use percentage
- Whether it was reimbursed
- Potential deductible percentage and amount
- Status and a short explanation
SORT EACH EXPENSE
Use three clear statuses:
- Potential deduction
- Generally nondeductible
- Needs review
For U.S. expenses, consult official IRS guidance for my selected tax year. Link the relevant source and explain the applicable limit in plain English. If you cannot verify a rule or lack enough context, mark the expense "Needs review."
Handle these examples:
- Airport snacks and travel meals: assess whether they qualify as business travel meals; generally apply the 50% limit to qualifying meals, including related tax and tip.
- Airport-to-hotel rides, baggage fees, luggage-handling tips, and hotel laundry: assess as potential business travel expenses when the trip qualifies.
- Vegas show tickets with a client: generally classify as nondeductible entertainment.
- A dress rented for a conference: generally classify as personal clothing; flag unusual circumstances for review.
Do not assume an expense qualifies just because I mention work. Ask about missing context, including mixed personal and business use, travel away from my tax home, and reimbursement. Prevent duplicate receipts and double-counting reimbursed expenses.
CREATE THE DASHBOARD
Use a clean, mobile-friendly layout with:
- Total expenses recorded
- Estimated potential deductions
- Amount awaiting review
- Generally nondeductible expenses
Show a searchable expense table with filters for trip, date, category, and status. Let me open any expense to see its receipt, explanation, and missing information, and edit or delete entries.
Calculate potential deductions using the eligible business portion and applicable deduction limit. Keep unresolved expenses out of that total. Label deductions as estimates, and do not present them as tax savings.
MAKE REVIEW EASY
Create a trip summary showing every receipt, total spending, potential deductions, and questions for my tax professional. Provide a downloadable spreadsheet or CSV if supported.
Keep the language friendly and concise. Include: "Estimates for tracking purposes. Review with a tax professional."
Start with an empty tracker ready for my first receipt. Do not invent expenses or amounts. If any requested feature is unsupported, explain the limitation and offer the closest workable option.That last line is doing a lot of work. Muse is brand new, and not every feature (like clickable filters) may be supported yet. Instead of quietly skipping things, it has to tell you what it can't do and offer the next best option, like a sorted spreadsheet instead of a filter menu.
Profile: answer the setup questions
Muse will ask for your tax year, your state, whether you're self-employed or an employee, and what your business actually is. Be specific. "Freelance brand strategist in Austin" gets you better answers than "consultant." If you have a trip coming up or one you just got back from, add it now: where, which dates, why you went, and which days were personal. That's how it figures out whether your Thursday night dinner counts.
Capture: one receipt, one sentence
Snap a photo or drop in a screenshot, then add a single line of context:
Lunch at the airport on my way to the Denver conference. Just me, not reimbursed.Muse reads the receipt, confirms anything blurry, assigns a status, and explains why, with a link to the IRS guidance it used. If it needs more info, like whether your employer already paid you back, it asks before it adds the expense to your totals. One receipt at a time takes about 20 seconds. Forty receipts the night before your accountant appointment takes considerably longer.
Speak it in: Wispr Flow
The real unlock isn't the tracker, it's how little effort it takes to feed it. I'm not typing out business purposes in a cab line at LAX. I dictate them. Wispr Flow turns a rambling "okay this was the car from the airport to the Marriott for the summit, I'm not getting reimbursed" into clean text the second I stop talking, so logging an expense never competes with whatever I'm actually doing that day.
Review: pull the trip summary
When a trip wraps, or when tax season rolls around, ask:
Show me the trip summary for Denver and export my tracker as a CSV.You get every receipt, total spending, estimated potential deductions, and a list of open questions to bring to your tax professional. The file lands in your Muse Library, and I'd also export it monthly and drop a copy somewhere you control, like Google Drive. Brand new apps are exciting. Brand new apps as the only home for your tax records are not.
Trust: but verify
This is a tracker, not a tax preparer. Every number is an estimate, and "potential deduction" does not mean money back in your pocket. Click through the IRS links it gives you. If a source doesn't say what Muse says it does, flip that expense to needs review. And treat "needs review" as a feature, not a failure. A tracker that confidently calls everything deductible is worse than no tracker at all. You want the gray areas flagged, because those are exactly the questions you're paying your accountant to answer.
That's the full system. One prompt, one sentence per receipt, zero shoeboxes. The pattern here, a clear set of rules plus an AI that applies them every single time, is the same blueprint behind every AI workflow worth building. Once you've built one, the rest are variations on the same idea.
If you want more of how I think about building in the age of AI, follow me on LinkedIn, Instagram, and TikTok so you don't miss what's coming next.
Jenny
P.S. If you want a weekly version of this specifically focused on AI, my other newsletter, The Women AI Weekly, is built exactly for that.
Estimates for tracking purposes. Review with a tax professional. This guide is for informational purposes only and isn't tax, legal, or financial advice.