AI Guides › Playbooks
By Nigel Guy · 8 min read
Most people "audit their subscriptions" by scrolling their banking app, spotting the streaming service they already knew about, and stopping. It feels productive because you found something. Meanwhile the annual renewal that only shows up once a year, the app-store charge billed under a name you don't recognise, and the free trial that quietly turned paid all sail through, because a scroll only shows you what you already remember paying for.
The newer default is worse: paste a year of bank statements into an AI chat, ask "what can I cancel?", and accept whatever list comes back. You get a confident answer, your transaction history now sits in a chat log, and nobody has checked the list.
The rule: let the AI build the tool, not see the money. Build the checker from fake rows, run your real statement through it yourself, and cancel through the route that actually stops the payment.
An artifact is something Claude makes that sits beside the chat as its own piece of work: a document, a dashboard, or a small interactive tool you can click around in. Anthropic's help centre lists artifacts as available on every plan, including Free, so you do not need a paid plan for this playbook. A few extras are paid-only: saved data storage inside an artifact is listed for Pro, Max, Team and Enterprise, and the newer templates are in beta on paid plans. You need none of them here.
Two set-up details trip beginners:
The Cut List is a five-step sequence and a three-label ledger.
| Step | What you do | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Export | Download 12 months of transactions from every current account and credit card as CSV | Twelve months catches annual renewals; a three-month window misses them |
| 2. Build blind | Ask Claude to build the checker using made-up sample rows in the same column layout | Claude never sees a real payee or amount |
| 3. Run it | Load your real CSV into the finished tool | The tool does the sorting; you see the result |
| 4. Label | Mark every recurring payment Keep, Cut or Check | Forces a decision on each line, not just the obvious ones |
| 5. Cancel by route | Stop each Cut through the right channel, then confirm it stopped | Deleting an app or ignoring an email cancels nothing |
Most UK banks and card providers let you download transactions as a CSV or spreadsheet file; where that lives varies by bank, so check yours. Open one file and note the column headings exactly (for example: Date, Description, Amount). Those headings are all Claude needs.
Write three or four invented rows using your real column headings but fake payees and amounts. Then use a prompt along these lines, in your own words:
Build me an interactive tool as an artifact. I'll load a bank transaction file in CSV format with these columns: [your exact headings]. Here are some made-up sample rows so you can see the layout: [your fake rows]. The tool should: group payments by payee, ignoring small differences in the description text; flag any payee charged on a regular pattern (weekly, monthly, quarterly or yearly); show each flagged payee with its typical amount, how often it's charged, the last date it was taken and an estimated yearly cost; let me tag each one Keep, Cut or Check; and show a running total of the yearly cost of everything tagged Cut. Do all of this inside the tool itself, with no AI features and no saved storage. Amounts are in pounds.
The last instruction matters. Artifacts can call Claude from inside the tool, and paid plans can give them stored data. A subscription checker needs neither. If the first version mis-reads your file, describe what went wrong ("it's treating refunds as subscriptions") rather than pasting real rows to show it.
Load your real CSV into the finished tool. Spot-check two or three flagged payees against the statement. If it missed a charge you know is there, describe the kind of charge to Claude and ask for a fix.
Every flagged payee gets one label:
How you cancel depends on how you pay. Work through this ladder for each Cut:
| How it's paid | Where to cancel | What to know |
|---|---|---|
| Through Apple | iPhone Settings > [your name] > Subscriptions, pick it, Cancel Subscription | No cancel button, or a red expiry note, means it's already cancelled |
| Through Google Play | Play Store subscriptions, pick it, Cancel subscription | Google says uninstalling the app does not cancel the subscription; you keep access until the paid period ends |
| Recurring card payment | The company's account settings first; if that fails, your card provider | The FCA says your card issuer can't insist you contact the business first. Ask by the end of the business day before the next payment |
| Direct Debit | The company's account settings, and/or your bank | You can cancel a Direct Debit with your bank at any time; tell the company too, because the contract may still be live |
The FCA also says that once you have cancelled a recurring card payment, any later charge counts as unauthorised and your card issuer must refund it. Note the date you cancelled.
This is a hypothetical household to show the flow, not real data.
Sam exports 12 months from a current account and a credit card. The tool flags eleven recurring payees. Six get Keep. Three get Cut: a meditation app last opened in spring, a second cloud-storage plan left over from an old phone, and a magazine that renews yearly in November. Two get Check: a short billing name Sam doesn't recognise, and a monthly charge that goes up halfway through the year.
The unrecognised name turns out to be an Apple-billed app from a free trial, so it's cancelled under iPhone Subscriptions. The rising charge is a broadband price change, so it moves to Keep with a note to haggle at renewal. The magazine company's website has no cancel button, so Sam asks the card provider to stop the recurring payment, two weeks before the November renewal. A month later Sam re-runs the tool to confirm nothing on the Cut list has charged again.