Open finance skill
Review recurring business costs
Which office, sales and administrative costs should we keep, renegotiate, combine or stop?
Review recurring costs outside headcount. Combine actual usage, contract terms, overlapping services and the work that depends on each supplier before proposing savings.
Records you need
- ✓Office, sales and administrative transactions
- ✓Contracts and renewals
- ✓Owner and usage evidence
What you get
- ✓Potential savings to review
- ✓Yearly spending under review
- ✓Risks of changing the service
Checks performed
- ✓Recurring charges
- ✓Overlapping services
- ✓Contract and operating risks
From finding to decision
Spend identified is not savings approved.
Separate spending that needs review from a proposed action and savings actually achieved. Contracts and work that depends on a service can change the options available.
- Confirm billing frequency and separate one-time from recurring charges.
- Collect the owner, usage, renewal terms and evidence of work that depends on the service.
- Record proposals to keep, negotiate, combine or stop services, with effective dates and costs.
Evidence ready for review
Each proposal has a spending baseline supported by records, a decision owner and conditions for carrying it out.
Who makes the next decision?
Count realized savings only after the approved action takes effect and subsequent charges support it.
Collect the supporting records from your software
Level diagnostic method reviewed . Apply it to the selected records and accounting policy; the teaching example does not resolve a live account.
Guided synthetic example
See the check from input to decision
A business has multiple recurring selling, general and administrative (SG&A) suppliers with uncertain ownership and overlapping services.
How review effort might be shared
An illustrative allocation is 15% collecting records, 20% applying checks, 10% flagging results, 25% investigating reasons, 20% finance review and 10% choosing an action. These percentages were not measured across engagements. Actual effort varies with data quality, complexity and the issue found.
Start with the source records
| Vendor | Annualized spend | Usage evidence | Renewal |
|---|---|---|---|
| Example Data | $24,000 | Low | Sep 30 |
| Sample Reports | $18,000 | Unknown | Monthly |
| Demo Compliance | $12,000 | Confirmed | Dec 1 |
Apply the documented check
Combine recurring spend, utilization, renewal terms, redundancy, and operating dependency. Exclude headcount.
Surface the flagged result
Needs review
$42,000 across Example Data and Sample Reports, the two low- or unknown-usage vendors, needs owner review out of $54,000 total annualized spend. None is classified as confirmed savings yet.
Use recorded finance judgment to analyze possible reasons
At Level, we record the review logic, known explanations, and questions our finance professionals use in this situation. AI applies that documented human judgment to organize the most plausible reasons, without pretending it knows which reason is true.
Possible reasons to investigate
Low or unknown usage is not proof that a service is unnecessary. Contract, control, customer, and integration dependencies must be checked.
Make the final human judgment
In a Level engagement, a Level finance professional validates the source evidence, challenges the AI-assisted analysis, and decides which explanation is supported.
Make the operating decision
Assign an owner and a keep, renegotiate, consolidate, or stop decision before each renewal date.
Each skill uses an independent synthetic scenario. Shared month labels do not mean the examples describe one company or a single financial period.
Use this system
Start with the example, then inspect the structure
The JSON download is a sample record file to inspect with an AI assistant or developer. It is not a file to upload into your accounting software.
- Download the invented input and expected output.
- Replace one field at a time with a safe test value.
- Compare the result with the expected structure.
- Have a finance professional review every exception before acting.
Website example JSON and registry: CC BY 4.0 (attribution required). Downloadable toolkit ZIP: MIT. Each version identifies its own frozen examples.
Developer preview: AI-assistant helper (MCP)
This tool call returns fixed, invented sample records only. It does not connect to your books. Read the setup instructions.
run_synthetic_example {"slug":"cost-rationalization-review"}Human review is part of the system
This check organizes evidence and surfaces exceptions. A person with finance domain expertise still needs to interpret the result, validate the source records, and discuss the operating decision.
Open source does not mean open client data. We publish reusable finance tools, checks, templates, and playbooks. Client records, workpapers, credentials, communications, and private configurations remain confidential.
Use it yourself, or bring us the messy part
Get a one-page plan for checking your records
Tell us where the records stop making sense. We will reply with the first check to run, the records it needs, and the decision that still needs human finance judgment.
Install the free skills yourself