Recurring Expense Approver

The problem this kills

Recurring spend is the spend nobody decides on. A software seat gets bought once, a membership renews quietly, a phone stipend keeps paying out - and each one auto-renews forever because the renewal date lands in someone's inbox at the wrong moment, or never lands anywhere at all. By the time finance notices, you're paying for seats nobody logs into, tools the team replaced months ago, and "stipends" attached to people who left.

The money hides because it's small per line and it's buried inside expense reports. There's no single moment where someone has to look at a renewal and say "yes, this is still worth it." So nothing ever gets cancelled.

This tool creates that moment - on purpose, every time, before the charge hits.

What you'll build

An internal web app where:

• You import your recurring items - vendor, amount, cadence, owner, and renewal date - from a spreadsheet or CSV.
• The tool watches every renewal date and, at a lead time you choose (say 30 days out), emails the budget owner a re-approval prompt: keep it, cancel it, or change the tier.
• Owners record a quick justification and usage note - and items with no recent usage get flagged as zombies.
• After the owner decides, finance signs off on continuing the reimbursement.
• The app keeps an always-current recurring register and spits out a cancellation list of everything killed or downgraded.

Nothing renews on autopilot. Every line gets a human yes before it costs you again.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

A complete, paste-and-go runbook written for a non-coder. You paste the whole thing into an AI coding agent (Claude Code) and answer its questions as it builds.

The plan opens by interviewing you about your business - your current renewal process, the systems and spreadsheets you use, how your vendors and owners are named, your real volumes, your approval rules, and your messiest edge cases. It reflects a short tailored spec back to you and gets your thumbs-up before it builds anything. You get a tool shaped around how you actually work, not a generic template.

From there it walks you step by step: the database, login, the import, the renewal watcher, the owner re-approval prompt, the finance sign-off gate, the zombie flag, and the register and cancellation-list exports - each step ending in a ready-to-copy prompt. It includes a "No API yet?" fallback so you can run the whole thing from a CSV or Google Sheet and Resend emails today, with no integration to your finance system required.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

This isn't a spreadsheet with reminders bolted on. The plan builds in real controls:

• Login so only your team can see and act on the data.
• Row-level security so each organization only ever sees its own recurring items.
• A complete audit trail - who approved or cancelled what, and exactly when.
• A hard human-in-the-loop gate: the tool drafts the renewal decision, the budget owner decides, finance signs off, and only then is the register updated. The AI never auto-renews or auto-cancels anything.
• Duplicate guards so the same item (vendor + owner + item) can't be imported or processed twice.

That governance is what turns a handy tracker into something finance can actually trust to control spend.

Who it's for

Finance and ops leads who can feel recurring spend creeping up but can't get ahead of it - because it's scattered across expense reports, owned by everyone and no one, and renewing in the background. If you want every renewal to become a deliberate, documented decision, this is for you. No coding experience required.

You've got this - paste the first prompt and let the agent build it with you.