AI With Tom
Open your bank statement. Count the ones you'd forgotten about.
40 MINUTES · PAYS BACK THIS MONTH · NO APPS, NO SETUP
Everything else in business is a fight. Winning work is hard. Raising prices is hard. Cutting costs usually means telling someone bad news.
This isn't any of those. This is money already leaving your account every month for things you either don't use, use once a quarter, or genuinely forgot you'd signed up for. Nobody loses out when you stop paying it.
I did this properly a few months ago across my own businesses. I found a funnel tool I'd stopped using, a subscription I'd genuinely forgotten existed, a shop platform for a shop I never launched, and an entire outbound stack — five separate tools — bought as a bundle for an approach I'd abandoned.
None of it was stupid at the time. All of it had quietly stopped being true, and nothing in the world was going to tell me.
Before you paste anything
Export twelve months from your business account and your card statements — plenty of tools get charged to a personal card and never appear on the business one.
Strip out anything sensitive first. You only need the date, the description and the amount. Delete account numbers, sort codes, balances and customer names before it goes anywhere.
Paste the transactions, then this underneath.
These are twelve months of business transactions.
Find every recurring payment — anything charged more than once to the same place. Include monthly, quarterly and annual.
Give me a table: what it is · how often · amount each time · total over the year · first appearance · most recent. Sort by annual total, biggest first.
Then flag separately:
1. Anything that increased in price during the year, and by how much
2. Anything charged annually — when it next renews
3. Two payments that look like they might do the same job
4. Anything that started in the last twelve months, since new ones are the likeliest to be unused
Don't guess what a company does if the name isn't clear — list it and let me identify it.
Fictional four-person agency. Their actual first pass.
Project tool — £58/mo — £696/yr
Six seats. Four people work here. Two left over a year ago. Downgraded — £232 saved.
Stock photo library — £29/mo — £348/yr
Last opened: couldn't remember. Cancelled. The monthly figure had felt like nothing for three years.
Email marketing platform — £41/mo — £492/yr
Bought for a newsletter that ran four times and stopped. Cancelled — the plan was already dead, the payment was just the last thing pretending otherwise.
Two tools doing the same job — £22 + £35/mo
Flagged by the prompt. Nobody had noticed because different people set them up. Kept one — £264 saved.
Design software — £599/yr, renews in five weeks
Annual, so invisible eleven months of the year. Genuinely needed — but they'd have paid it again without ever deciding to. Kept, deliberately, and the date's in the diary now.
Not one customer was upset, not one price was raised, nobody was let go. That's the rarest kind of money there is.
The list is worthless until something's actually cancelled. Most people do the audit, feel productive, and cancel nothing — because each individual one is small and there's always something more urgent.
Do the top three before you close the tab. Fifteen minutes. The rest can wait; those three usually carry most of the money.
Then put every annual renewal date in your calendar with a week's warning. Annual subscriptions are the ones that survive every audit, because they're invisible on eleven statements out of twelve.
Diary it for six months' time and do it again.
New subscriptions accumulate at roughly the rate you try new things, which for most business owners is faster than they'd guess. The second run always finds something — usually something bought since the first one.
Notice what actually did the work here. AI didn't decide anything — it found the repeats and turned monthly figures into annual ones. The judgement was all yours, because only you know whether you opened it.
That's the shape of nearly every useful thing you'll do with it: let it do the reading, keep the deciding. Every task where you're scanning a long list for patterns is the same job as this one, and there are more of those in your week than you'd think.