Efficient Tax Filing with Claude

A user shares their experience of filing taxes for 2025 using Claude, which automated the process of extracting transactions and categorizing expenses. The conversational approach made the task enjoyable and significantly reduced the time spent compared to previous years.

added by @magheru_san

I finally submitted my tax return for 2025 by talking to Claude, after procrastinating it for many months because for my ADHD brain it felt overwhelming to get started.

Last year I also did it very late, I only could get myself to do it after I spent a few days building a tool that helped me parse and tag my bank transactions from the monthly ING DiBa PDF dumps, and then I did the rest manually on the SteuerGo website.

This "building to get started" is a mind hack I use a lot to get myself to stop procrastinating on "boring" but important things by building tools that automate parts of the clunky process, which I also do a lot in my day to day AWS cost optimization work.

This year I did it entirely with Claude in a conversational way. I didn't even start building upon the tool I built last year, and it turned out even easier/faster than ever.

Using the Open Computer Use MCP by @just_some_dev I told Claude to browse the bank website, download all the PDF documents for last year, month by month.

Claude built some small scripts that extracted all transactions to a CSV file, categorize transactions based on purpose, and even populate and submit the online form in SteuerGo after careful review.

The categorization was mind-blowing, it even noticed my business expenses for my AWS, Azure and GCP accounts, Google Suite and a few more subscriptions I have and only had a few questions about some transactions that weren't clear to be personal, since as a freelancer I sometimes purchase using the wrong credit card.

I didn't trust it at first, but then I asked it to also download the data for the previous years and verified the numbers I had submitted myself.

It came within just a few euros difference coming from currency exchange rates that I had considered as fixed throughout the entire year, while Claude queried the historical currency exchange data for each month, so it was even more precise than I had ever done it.

Throughout the process I also had many conversations with Claude on a bunch of small tax related questions that I would have just let go before, because I didn't worth it to involve a tax advisor for a few euros I could have saved here and there.

While at it, we also downloaded the documents for 2026 so far, and some of them were used automatically by Claude, such as the pre-payment adjustments for 2025 I had done earlier this year.

Overall it was a very pleasant experience that took maybe 6h in total of talking to Claude over a couple of days, much better than in the previous years. I used to spend multiple days of manually digging through invoices and bank statements and filling the forms myself which felt soul crushing.

This time it actually felt like having fun, which I could have never imagined I'd ever say about doing my taxes.

If you're also struggling with this, just give it a try using your favorite LLM harness.