Hackbooks Pro

A Cheap Bastard’s Guide to Tax Bookkeeping with AI

By: Scott Brown, Jack Cohen, Daniel Hall

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Your financial records are a mess. Congratulations. You're normal.



You have twelve months of bank statements, a couple of credit cards, maybe a brokerage account, maybe some 1099 income—and now somebody expects you to turn all of it into neat, organized records for tax season.



You could spend days doing it manually. You could pay for another piece of bookkeeping software. You could dump the whole mess on your CPA and pay a professional to figure out what happened.



Or you could be a Cheap Bastard.



HACKBOOKS PRO shows you how to use AI to turn a year's worth of messy financial records into organized, CPA-ready books in about 1–2 hours.



No accounting degree required. No complicated bookkeeping system to learn. If you can download a statement, upload a file, and copy and paste a prompt into Claude, you can follow this system.



Inside, you'll learn how to:

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• Gather a complete financial year from checking, savings, credit cards, brokerage, and business accounts.
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• Use Claude to extract and normalize transactions into one clean table.
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• Categorize income, expenses, and transfers without double-counting your own money.
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• Reconcile accounts, find duplicates, and flag unclear or missing transactions.
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• Build a transaction ledger, income-and-expense summary, and investment summary your CPA can actually work with.
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• Understand your own numbers well enough to catch mistakes before they become expensive.
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The prompts are already written for you.



This isn't 150 pages of AI theory. You actually use it.



Step 1 — Extract & Normalize

Turn differently formatted statements into one consistent transaction table.



Step 2 — Categorize

Sort income, expenses, transfers, investments, fees, taxes, and more.



Step 3 — Reconcile & Deduplicate

Find duplicates, match internal transfers, and identify things that don't add up.



Step 4 — Assemble

Generate your ledger, income-and-expense report, and investment summary.



Then export the finished records and hand them to your CPA.



And here's the important part: the AI doesn't get the final vote. You do.



HACKBOOKS PRO teaches you to review the output, spot-check balances, investigate uncertain transactions, and flag anything that needs professional judgment. It also includes an adaptive bookkeeping and tax-literacy knowledge check so you can find out whether you really understand the numbers you're reviewing.



Written by people who know money, taxes, and what happens when financial records go wrong.



Scott M. Brown, Ph.D. is a tenured Professor of Finance. Jack Cohen, CPA spent 33 years with the IRS, including major corporate audit work. Daniel Hall, J.D. is a USA Today and Wall Street Journal bestselling author, attorney, publisher, and financial educator.



A bookkeeping system for people who don't want bookkeeping to become a second career.



Gather the statements. Open Claude. Copy the prompts. Check the numbers. Hand your CPA something considerably better than a shoebox full of financial archaeology.



Buy HACKBOOKS PRO today—and turn last year's financial mess into organized books before it costs you another weekend.



Educational use only. The process produces preliminary records for review and organization and does not replace tax, accounting, legal, investment, or other professional advice.