Audit your recurring vendor spend on the first of each month

On the first of each month at 7am, audit my recurring vendor spend and tell me what changed.

Start by pulling the last 120 days of activity from my Mercury account with List Transactions, and look only at money going out. The 120 day window is deliberate: it gives at least three cycles of a monthly subscription, which is what you need to tell a real price change apart from a one-off charge.

Group the outgoing charges by merchant. Merchant names vary between charges, so match them loosely rather than requiring exact string equality. Treat things like "GOOGLE *GSUITE_acme", "GOOGLE GSUITE" and "Google Workspace" as the same vendor. Use the amount and the timing as corroborating evidence when the name alone is ambiguous.

Then decide which merchants are actually recurring, meaning they charge on a repeating interval rather than ad hoc. For each recurring vendor, work out the billing cadence: monthly, quarterly, or annual. Establish cadence before you flag anything, because an annual renewal treated as a monthly charge looks like an enormous anomalous spike when it is really just a normal renewal.

Now compare each vendor's latest charge against its earlier charges and identify four things:

• Price increases, where the latest charge is higher than the vendor's established amount for that same cadence.

• Duplicate charges, where the same vendor was charged more than once inside a single billing period.

• Brand new subscriptions, where a vendor appears in the recent window with no earlier history in the 120 days.

• Free trials that converted to paid, where a vendor was previously charging nothing or a token verification amount and is now billing at full price.

Use judgement about what counts as a genuine price increase. Usage based bills such as cloud hosting, telephony, ad spend, and per seat tools that scale with headcount move up and down every month by nature. That is not a price increase and I do not want it reported as one. Only call it out when the vendor's price genuinely stepped up, and ignore trivial moves of a dollar or two.

Keep a vendor register in Notion. For each recurring vendor, use Query a Database to look for an existing page in my vendor register database. If a page already exists, use Update a Page to record the current amount, the billing cadence, and the last charge date. If none exists, use Create a Page to add the vendor with those same details. Match against the register loosely as well, since the page title may not exactly equal the merchant string that appears on the charge.

Finally, post a summary to Slack with Send a Message. List only what changed, and leave out everything that stayed the same. Group the findings under the four headings above. For each price increase give the old amount, the new amount, and the dollar impact, annualized so I can see what it actually costs me over a year. Close with total monthly recurring spend, normalizing annual and quarterly subscriptions to their monthly equivalent so the figure is comparable month to month. If nothing changed at all, say so in one line with the total, rather than sending a long empty report.