# Audit your recurring vendor spend on the first of each month

> On the first of each month, we check your business banking for price increases, duplicate charges, and new subscriptions, then post what changed to Slack.

- Workflow type: agent
- Services: Mercury, Notion, Slack
- Categories: Finance, Operations
- Published: 2026-08-07

## What it does

- Reviews the last four months of outgoing payments from your business bank account and works out which merchants are genuine recurring subscriptions.
- Flags the four things that quietly cost you money: price increases, the same vendor charged twice in one billing period, brand new subscriptions, and free trials that converted to paid.
- Keeps a running vendor register in Notion with each vendor's current amount, billing cycle, and last charge date.
- Posts a Slack summary of only what changed, with the dollar impact of every increase and your total monthly recurring spend.

## What you'll need

- A Mercury business banking account. Read only access is enough, since this workflow never moves money.
- A Notion workspace with a database to hold your vendor register, shared with the connection.
- A Slack workspace and a channel where the monthly summary should land.

## Prompt

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.

## How to customize

- Change the timing: run it weekly or quarterly instead of on the first of each month.
- Change how sensitive it is: set the smallest price increase worth reporting so minor changes stay quiet.
- Change where it posts: send the summary to a private finance channel, or have it direct message you instead.

## Example output

Recurring vendor audit, 1 August

Price increases (2)
- Figma: $144 to $180 per month, +$432 per year
- Notion: $80 to $96 per month, +$192 per year

Duplicate charges (1)
- Vercel charged twice in the same billing period, 12 Jul and 14 Jul, $60 duplicated

New subscriptions (1)
- Linear, $128 per month, first charge 22 Jul

Trials that converted to paid (1)
- Retool, was $0, now $210 per month

Total monthly recurring spend: $6,482 (annual and quarterly plans normalized to monthly)

## FAQ

### Does this move any money out of my account?

No. It only reads your transaction history. Read only banking access is all it needs, so it cannot send payments or change anything in your bank.

### My vendors show up under a different name on every charge. Will that break it?

No. Merchant names are matched loosely rather than exactly, so the variations of one vendor name are grouped together as a single subscription instead of looking like several different ones.

### Will an annual renewal get reported as a huge price increase?

No. It works out whether each vendor bills monthly, quarterly, or annually before comparing anything, so an annual renewal is recognized as a normal renewal rather than an alarming spike.

### What about bills that change every month anyway, like cloud hosting or ads?

Usage based bills are expected to move around, and normal variation is not reported as a price increase. Only a genuine step up in what a vendor charges gets flagged.

### What happens in a month when nothing changed?

You get a single line saying nothing changed, along with your total monthly recurring spend, instead of a long report you do not need to read.

Use this prompt in General Input: https://www.generalinput.com/prompts/audit-your-recurring-vendor-spend-on-the-first-of-each-month