Finance Workflows: Audit Subscriptions Fast

Nobody budgets for the ghost subscriptions. The free trial you forgot to cancel three years ago. The newsletter that started charging after the promo. The SaaS you used twice and never opened again. Surveys consistently find that the average adult leaks $200-400 a month to subscriptions they don't actively use. That's real money — $2,400 to $4,800 a year — and almost all of it is recoverable with one good audit.

The problem isn't motivation. It's that a subscription audit is tedious. You have to open your bank statements, scan every line, match cryptic merchant names to actual services, decide which to kill, then go hunt down each cancellation flow. It's a full afternoon of work nobody wants to do.

ClawFlows' audit-subscriptions workflow turns that afternoon into about 60 seconds of review.

Key Takeaways

• audit-subscriptions is a ClawFlows workflow that scans your bank and credit card transactions for recurring charges.
• It identifies subscriptions by pattern — repeated amounts, consistent merchant names, regular intervals.
• It flags forgotten or unused subscriptions by comparing against a usage list you maintain.
• It's part of the Finance category in nikilster/clawflows, alongside monthly-spending-review and tax-prep.
• Running it quarterly saves most people $500-1,500 per year in recovered subscription waste.

What the Workflow Does

When you invoke audit-subscriptions, the workflow:

1. Pulls your transaction history from configured sources (bank CSV exports, Plaid API, etc.)
2. Identifies recurring charges by pattern matching on amounts and merchants
3. Normalizes merchant names because "NFLX DIGITAL NTFLX" and "Netflix" should match
4. Compares against an active list you maintain of subscriptions you're using
5. Flags candidates for cancellation — recurring charges not on your active list
6. Produces a report with merchant, amount, frequency, and cancellation URL if known

The whole thing runs in under a minute. The output is a scannable list you can act on the same day.

What About Bank Aggregation?

The workflow supports several methods for getting transaction data:

• CSV export from your bank (most private, most manual)
• Plaid integration (automatic, requires API setup)
• Apple Card / Google Pay exports for digital wallets
• Manual entry if you're rolling old-school

CSV is the most common starting point. Plaid is better if you want to run the workflow monthly without manual exports.

The Other Finance Workflows

monthly-spending-review

A broader version of the subscription audit. It categorizes all spending for the month, compares against your budget, and highlights anomalies. Useful if you're trying to get a real picture of where money goes — not just subscriptions.

The default categories are food, housing, transport, utilities, subscriptions, entertainment, and uncategorized. You can customize.

tax-prep

Runs near tax time. Collects 1099s, interest statements, charitable contributions, and deductible expenses from your configured sources. Produces a summary you can hand to your accountant or plug into tax software.

For self-employed users, this is the highest-ROI finance workflow in the collection — it compresses what's usually a full weekend of receipt-hunting into about 20 minutes of review.

track-invoices

For freelancers and consultants. Tracks which invoices are outstanding, overdue, or paid based on your accounting tool or manual log. Sends reminder nudges for overdue items.

Privacy Considerations

Finance data is sensitive. The ClawFlows finance workflows are designed to run locally by default — transaction data doesn't leave your machine unless you explicitly configure a cloud destination. This matters, and we recommend keeping it local.

If you're using Plaid or similar API integrations, your data does flow through their systems (by design). The workflow itself doesn't add new data paths — it just reads what Plaid already has access to.

Running the Audit

The minimum viable audit routine:

1. Export last 90 days of transactions from your bank as CSV
2. Run audit-subscriptions with the CSV as input
3. Review the output — each line is a potential cancellation
4. For each subscription you don't want, visit the cancellation URL and kill it
5. Update your "active subscriptions" list so future audits are more accurate

First-time audits typically take an hour of follow-through work (cancelling things). Quarterly audits take 10-20 minutes because you've already cleaned up the biggest leaks.

What I Found In My First Audit

When I ran this on my own accounts, I found:

• Two SaaS subscriptions I'd forgotten about ($49/month combined)
• A meal delivery trial I never cancelled ($79/month, ouch)
• A streaming service I hadn't opened in six months ($15/month)
• Three newsletters that had started charging ($20/month combined)
• A VPN subscription renewed automatically after I'd switched providers ($12/month)

Total: $175/month in recovered waste, or $2,100/year. The audit took 45 minutes of follow-through work once I had the list.

Pairing With Other Workflows

Finance workflows pair well with routines that require clear-headed attention:

• morning-briefing — add a monthly finance line to your briefing once a month (profiled in Morning Briefing Workflow: Start Your Day Right)
• activate-focus-mode — run audits during a focused block, not between context switches
• security-audit — finance and security go together (see Security Audit Workflows for Solo Devs)

FAQ

Is it safe to connect my bank?

You don't have to. CSV export works without any connection — the workflow reads files from disk. If you do use Plaid or similar, the security model is the same as any other Plaid-backed app.

What if my bank is small and doesn't export well?

You can do a manual entry workflow. Most ClawFlows users with niche banks run a "paste my statement into a text file" approach and point the workflow at that.

Does it work with multiple accounts?

Yes. You can pass multiple source files or configure multiple connections, and the workflow de-duplicates across them.

Can it actually cancel subscriptions for me?

No, and that's intentional. Cancellation flows are hostile by design, and automating them would create reliability problems. The workflow identifies candidates; you do the cancelling.

How often should I run it?

Quarterly is the sweet spot for most people. Monthly is overkill unless you're actively trying to cut spending. Annually is too infrequent — you'll miss things.

Recover $2,000 This Weekend

If you haven't audited your subscriptions in the last year, you're probably leaking hundreds of dollars a month. audit-subscriptions is the fastest way to find and fix the leak. Install ClawFlows (see How to Install ClawFlows in One Command) and run your first audit this weekend.

Explore all 113 workflows at aiskill.market/workflows or submit your own.

Sources

• nikilster/clawflows on GitHub — source for finance workflows
• OpenClaw documentation
• 113 Workflows That Run Your Digital Life
• Plaid developer docs
• Anthropic Claude docs