spend-map

---
name: spend-map
description: Turns twelve months of bank statements and card bills into one page showing every pound that leaves the business, what it buys, who can stop it, and when its contract renews. Use when you know the money is going somewhere and cannot say where, or before you try to cut anything.
---

# See every pound leaving the business on one page, with the renewal dates attached

You give this twelve months of bank statements for every account, the business card bills, the direct debit list, and whatever contracts you can lay hands on. You get back three things: one page ranking every category of spend by pounds, a line-by-line map underneath it with a named owner and a renewal date against every recurring payment, and a calendar of the next twelve months of renewal and notice dates. Nothing is labelled miscellaneous. Where a payment cannot be identified, it says so by name and amount, because an unidentified direct debit is the most expensive line on any statement.

## What it does

1. **Take twelve full months, every account, and every single line.** Current account, deposit account, the card the chef uses, the personal card that keeps getting used for the business, PayPal, the payment provider's fee deductions, and anything on finance. Twelve months, not three, because annual insurance, the licence, the accountancy fee and the alarm contract only appear once and they are exactly the lines nobody remembers. Do not sample and do not start with the big ones. A spend map built from the payments the owner already knows about will confirm what they already believe, which is the one outcome that has no value.

2. **Give every line a category from a fixed list, and never write miscellaneous.** Use categories the owner recognises: food, drink, packaging and disposables, wages, employer National Insurance and pension, rent, business rates, insurance, utilities, waste, repairs and maintenance, equipment, cleaning and hygiene, licences and subscriptions, card and platform fees, professional fees, marketing, bank charges and interest, finance and lease payments, and one final category called "not yet identified". HMRC's own list of allowable categories for a business is close to this shape, covering "costs of your business premises, for example heating, lighting, business rates", "staff costs, for example salaries or subcontractor costs", "things you buy to sell on, for example stock or raw materials", "financial costs, for example insurance or bank charges", and "advertising or marketing, for example website costs". Everything that lands in "not yet identified" gets listed by date, amount and payee on its own page. That page is usually where the surprise is.

3. **Mark every line fixed, variable or discretionary, and write the name of the person who can stop it.** Fixed leaves the account whether you trade or not. Variable moves with covers. Discretionary is anything you could cancel this month without breaking a contract or a law. The owner's name goes against most of them, but not all: the head chef controls the food line, the general manager controls the agency line, and a cost with no named owner is a cost nobody is watching. This column is what turns the map into a decision, because "reduce overheads" is not actionable and "the general manager cancels the second bottled water account on the 30th" is.

4. **Put a contract, a renewal date and a notice period beside every recurring payment.** For each recurring line find the contract, record the supplier, the start date, the end date, the notice period required to leave, and whether it auto-renews. Where no contract can be found, write "no contract held" rather than assuming there is not one. This is the part owners skip and it is where the money is: a card terminal on a 48-month term, a waste contract that rolls for another year unless cancelled 90 days out, a bottled-gas account nobody has priced since 2021. A saving you cannot take until next March is not a saving this month, and a map without renewal dates will produce a list of cuts that cannot legally be made.

5. **Give the property block its own page, because it is usually the second largest number and the least examined.** The RICS Code for leasing business premises lists the occupancy costs an occupier should expect to account for: rent, VAT, rates, service charges, insurance, utilities, repairs and dilapidations, fitting-out and alterations, and any additional costs, totalled per year and over the lease. Reproduce that list with your actual figures against each line and a total. Then check the rates line against the reliefs, because "You will not pay business rates on a property with a rateable value of £12,000 or less", and "For properties with a rateable value of £12,001 to £15,000, the rate of relief will go down gradually from 100% to 0%". A business paying rates it does not owe will not find that out from its accountant's year-end summary; it finds out from a page like this one.

6. **Test the energy block against the microbusiness rules, because most small hospitality sites qualify and do not know it.** Ofgem's definition is specific: a business is a microbusiness if it "has fewer than 10 employees or their full-time equivalent and has an annual turnover or balance sheet total of not more than £2 million", or alternatively if it consumes no more than 100,000 kWh of electricity or 293,000 kWh of gas a year. Microbusinesses have protections, and one of them bears directly on a spend map: third party intermediaries, which Ofgem defines as "organisations or individuals that give energy-related advice, aimed at helping you to buy energy and/or manage your energy needs", including "switching sites, energy brokers and any company that offers support with energy procurement", are paid out of your unit rate, and "Information on TPI costs that will be included in the bill the supplier sends you must be provided to all businesses via the Principal Terms and upon request". Ofgem also states that for a micro or small business the broker "should be signed up to an alternative redress scheme, also known as a Qualifying Dispute Settlement Scheme (QDSS)". So for each meter record the supplier, the contract end date, the unit rate, the standing charge, whether a broker arranged it, and whether the broker's commission is disclosed. Owners routinely find a commission they never agreed to pay sitting inside a unit rate.

7. **Separate the business's money from the owner's, and flag every mixed line rather than splitting it yourself.** The van insurance, the mobile phone, the home broadband, the car fuel, the family meal put through on the business card. HMRC's position on mixed use is short: "You can only claim allowable expenses for the business costs", and its worked example allows only the £70 of business calls out of a £200 phone bill. Do not invent a business percentage. List each mixed line with its full amount and mark it for the accountant to apportion. Getting this wrong in either direction is expensive: claiming the lot invites a correction, and claiming none of it means the owner is paying tax on money they spent on the business.

8. **Convert everything to cost per month and cost per cover, then rank by pounds.** Annualise every irregular payment and divide by twelve so the categories are comparable, then divide each category by the covers or transactions served in the year. Cost per cover is the unit that makes a spend map argue with itself: a £4,800 annual waste bill is abstract, and 38 pence a cover next to a gross profit of £4.10 a cover is not. Rank the categories biggest first, and then rank the individual suppliers within the top three categories, because concentration is a finding in its own right. Name any single supplier taking more than a fifth of total spend, which is both a negotiating position and a risk if they fail.

9. **Finish with one page, a calendar and three named actions.** The page carries the top ten lines by pounds, each with its monthly figure, its per-cover figure, its owner and its renewal date. The calendar lists the next twelve months of renewal dates and notice deadlines in date order, with the date you must act by rather than the date the contract ends, which is usually months earlier. The three actions are the three cheapest real savings available in the next ninety days, each with the person who does it and the date. Then keep the paperwork: a company "must keep records for 6 years from the end of the last company financial year they relate to", and "You can be fined £3,000 by HMRC or disqualified as a company director if you do not keep accounting records."

## Then it checks

1. The map covers twelve consecutive months, every account is named with its sort code masked, and the number of statement lines processed is stated and reconciles to the number of lines categorised.
2. No line is categorised as miscellaneous or other; anything unidentified appears on a separate page listing date, amount and payee, with a total.
3. Every line carries a fixed, variable or discretionary marker and the name of a person who can stop it, with no blanks.
4. Every recurring payment carries a supplier, a renewal date and a notice period, or the explicit words "no contract held".
5. Every category shows an annual figure, a monthly figure and a cost per cover, using a stated cover or transaction count for the same twelve months.
6. Mixed business and personal lines are listed with their full amounts and marked for apportionment, and no business percentage has been assumed by the map itself.

Any check fails: name it, redo that step once. Failed twice: say what is wrong and stop.

## Rules
- Public information only.
- Never invent a fact, a number or a quote.
- Anything sent in someone's name says whose name it is.
- Never write miscellaneous, other or sundries. Those words are where money hides, and a category nobody can explain is a category nobody will ever cancel.
- Never recommend cancelling a contract without its notice period beside it. A cut announced before the notice date is checked becomes a breach, an early termination fee, or an argument with a supplier you still need next week.
- Never apportion a mixed business and personal cost yourself. State the whole figure, flag it, and let the accountant split it, because a percentage invented here becomes a figure in a tax return.
- Never rank by percentage. Rank by pounds. A category that rose 40% may be £200, and the category that is quietly costing £14,000 rarely moves at all.
- This output is a working document prepared for the owner's accountant to check before it is used for a tax return, a funding application or a decision to cancel a contract. It categorises bank lines and states arithmetic; it is not tax advice and the allowability of any expense must be confirmed.

## Built from
- GOV.UK, "Running a limited company: Company and accounting records", https://www.gov.uk/running-a-limited-company/company-and-accounting-records, read 14 September 2026: the records a company must keep, the six-year retention period and the £3,000 penalty, which is why step 9 ends with keeping the paperwork rather than the spreadsheet alone.
- HM Revenue & Customs, "Expenses if you're self-employed", https://www.gov.uk/expenses-if-youre-self-employed, read 14 September 2026: the category list that shaped step 2, and the mixed business and personal use rule that step 7 refuses to apply on the owner's behalf.
- Ofgem, "Third Party Intermediaries: what your microbusiness needs to know", https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/guidance/third-party-intermediaries-what-your-microbusiness-needs-know, published 14 October 2022, read 14 September 2026: the microbusiness definition, the definition of a third party intermediary, the Principal Terms disclosure of broker costs and the redress scheme requirement, all of which are step 6.
- RICS, "Code for leasing business premises, England and Wales, 1st edition", February 2020, effective 1 September 2020, https://www.rics.org/content/dam/ricsglobal/documents/standards/February_2020_Code_For_Leasing_Business_Premises_England_And_Wales_1st_Edition.pdf, read 14 September 2026: the checklist of occupancy costs at appendix B15, reproduced as the property page in step 5.
- GOV.UK, "Apply for business rates relief: Small business rate relief", https://www.gov.uk/apply-for-business-rate-relief/small-business-rate-relief, read 14 September 2026: the £12,000 and £15,000 rateable value thresholds used to test the rates line in step 5.

# spend-map

## You are given
A folder for one UK business containing any of: bank statement exports (CSV, OFX or PDF) for twelve consecutive months across one or more accounts, card statements, a direct debit list, supplier contracts, energy bills and a business rates bill. The user will say the period and the number of covers or transactions served in it. Never invent a payee, a category or a renewal date.

## Produce
Write these files into an `output/` folder beside the inputs.

1. `spend-lines.csv` - one row per statement line. Columns: `line_id, account, date, payee, amount_gbp, direction, category, cost_type, owner, recurring, source_file`. `direction` is `out` or `in`; only `out` lines are categorised. `cost_type` is `fixed`, `variable` or `discretionary`. `recurring` is `yes` or `no`. `category` must come from this list: food, drink, packaging, wages, employer_nic_pension, rent, business_rates, insurance, utilities, waste, repairs_maintenance, equipment, cleaning_hygiene, licences_subscriptions, card_platform_fees, professional_fees, marketing, bank_charges_interest, finance_lease, not_yet_identified. Never use miscellaneous, other or sundries.
2. `category-summary.csv` - columns: `category, annual_gbp, monthly_gbp, per_cover_gbp, share_of_total_pct, line_count`. Sort descending by `annual_gbp`.
3. `supplier-summary.csv` - columns: `payee, annual_gbp, share_of_total_pct, line_count, categories, recurring`. Sort descending by `annual_gbp`. Add a `concentration_flag` column set to `yes` where `share_of_total_pct` is above 20.
4. `renewal-calendar.csv` - one row per recurring commitment. Columns: `payee, category, annual_gbp, contract_start, contract_end, notice_period_days, act_by_date, auto_renews, contract_held`. `act_by_date` is `contract_end` minus `notice_period_days`. Where no contract was found, set `contract_held=no` and leave the date columns empty. Sort ascending by `act_by_date`.
5. `unidentified.csv` - every line with `category=not_yet_identified`. Columns: `date, payee, amount_gbp, account, source_file`. Include the total.
6. `spend-map.md` - one page. Total annual spend first, then the top ten lines by pounds with monthly, per-cover, owner and act-by date, then the concentration flags, the unidentified total, and the next six act-by dates in date order.

## Rules
- British English. No em dash characters. Use " - " or a comma. No emoji.
- Mask account numbers and sort codes to the last four digits in every file.
- Never split a mixed business and personal line. Record the full amount and set `owner=APPORTION - ACCOUNTANT`.
- Never assume a notice period. If the contract does not state one, leave `notice_period_days` and `act_by_date` empty.
- State the statement line count read and the line count categorised in `spend-map.md`; they must be equal.
- If fewer than twelve months of statements are present, still write every file and name the missing months in the first line of `spend-map.md`.

## Return
The absolute path of the `output/` folder, the total annual spend, the top five categories by pounds, the number and value of unidentified lines, any supplier over 20% of spend, and a numbered list of every input you could not find.