How to automate vendor renewals with AI

What are you actually paying for?

Start from transactions rather than a list someone maintained, because a subscription nobody remembers is exactly the one missing from the list.

Prompt: “Pull 18 months of Mercury transactions across all accounts and cards, plus supplier bills from Xero over the same period. Find every payee that charged us more than twice at a regular interval. Build a sheet: vendor, what we pay per charge, the interval, total spent over 18 months, the account or card it hits, and the date of the most recent charge. Add a column for whether the amount ever changed, and if so when and by how much. Flag anything charged once at a large amount as a possible annual contract.”

The price-change column earns its place immediately. Silent uplifts of eight or nine percent at renewal are common and almost never noticed on a single monthly line.

Find the notice period behind each renewal date

A renewal date without a notice period is not actionable.

If cancellation needs 60 days of written notice, the date that matters is two months earlier than the one in your calendar.

Prompt: “For each vendor on the sheet, find the contract. Check PandaDoc for a completed document naming that vendor, then search my Gmail for order forms, countersigned agreements, and renewal notices from their domain. For each one you find, extract: term length, renewal type, notice period and how notice must be given, the current price and any uplift clause, and the named signatory on our side. Quote the exact sentence for the notice period and link the document. Where you find nothing, write ‘no contract found’. Do not infer terms from the vendor’s public pricing page.”

Leave the gaps visible instead of filling them from a pricing page. The gaps tell you which vendors to go and ask.

Which renewals are worth a conversation?

Rank the register by where you have room to push: money, timing, and whether anyone would notice if it stopped.

Prompt: “Add three columns to the register. First, annualised cost. Second, the internal owner: check Slack and my Gmail for who set it up or who talks about it, and write ‘unknown’ if nobody obviously does. Third, a usage note: for vendors with a seat count in the contract, tell me the seats we pay for. Then sort by annualised cost and give me the top ten with, for each, one line on what I should ask before it renews.”

An unknown owner on a five-figure line is where the waste is, and this pass is the cheapest way to find one.

Put the deadlines where they will interrupt someone

Prompt: “For every vendor with a known notice period, create two Google Calendar events: one on the last day we can give notice, titled ‘NOTICE DEADLINE, vendor, cancel by today’, and one 30 days before that titled ‘Renewal review, vendor’. Put the annual cost, the notice wording, and the contract link in the description, and invite the internal owner where we know one. Show me the full list of events before you create any of them.”

Two events rather than one, because the review has to happen while there is still time to act on it. This is the kind of standing operations scaffolding that pays for itself the first time a bad contract lapses on purpose.

How does the register stay true?

Prompt: “On the first Monday of each month, re-scan Mercury and Xero for the previous month.

Report three things in #ops: new recurring payees that are not on the register, existing vendors whose charge amount changed, and vendors on the register that did not charge us and might have lapsed. Add the new ones to the sheet with blank contract fields, and message me the list of blanks to fill. Do not create calendar events for anything until I have confirmed the terms.”

Watching for vendors that stopped charging matters as much as watching for new ones. A failed card on a tool your support team depends on is otherwise discovered at the worst possible moment.

Frequently asked questions