As of 13 August 2026, AI can identify unnecessary spending in your bank account.

What to actually do

1. Use a tool built for this

   The route this page recommends

2. Do it yourself

   Second choice

   A chat interface, chat-fluent skill, and roughly 30 minutes until you can act on the result.

   How to actually do it

   1. Open your bank's online banking or app and export the relevant transactions as a CSV or spreadsheet, choosing a period that shows your normal spending pattern.
   2. Remove account numbers, sort codes, card numbers, addresses and other details that are not needed for transaction analysis, while keeping the date, description and amount columns.
   3. Open ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini and paste the prompt, then upload the redacted CSV or spreadsheet when asked.
   4. Ask the chatbot to reconcile the category totals and recurring-payment table to the original transaction file, and to identify any rows it could not classify.
   5. Open the original bank statement beside the AI output and compare flagged merchants, dates, amounts and totals row by row.
   6. For each flagged payment, check the contract, renewal terms or household need before deciding whether to cancel, downgrade or keep it.
   7. Create your final list of actions yourself, then use your bank's official cancellation or payment-management process rather than asking the chatbot to access your account.

   Prompt

   I want to identify spending in my bank transactions that may be unnecessary, without making decisions automatically. I will paste or upload a CSV or spreadsheet export containing transaction date, description, amount and debit or credit information. Do not ask for or use my bank login, account number, sort code, card number or full personal details. If these appear in the data, tell me to redact them.
   
   Analyse the transactions and return:
   1. A table of recurring payments, including merchant, apparent frequency, average amount and the transactions supporting each pattern.
   2. A table of spending categories with totals and the transactions included in each category.
   3. A list of unusual, duplicated or possibly avoidable payments, clearly labelling each as a possibility rather than a fact.
   4. A list of subscriptions or regular payments that I should check, with the exact evidence from the transactions.
   5. Questions I should answer before cancelling or reducing anything.
   
   Do not call any payment unnecessary solely because it is large, frequent or discretionary. Do not invent merchant identities, categories, totals or explanations. If the data is incomplete or ambiguous, say so and show the affected rows. Reconcile all totals to the supplied transactions and state any rows you could not classify. Do not recommend cancelling essential bills, insurance, debt repayments, tax payments or services without telling me to check the contract, cancellation terms and consequences first. Finish by asking me to confirm which flagged items are genuinely non-essential before suggesting a spending plan.

   Open it prefilled in ChatGPT or Claude, or copy it into Gemini, which takes no prefill link.

3. Hand it to a person

   The distant third

   A person who owns the outcome does this end to end, worth it when the failure is dear.