Find the suppliers you're paying twice for the same thing

Supplier lists grow by accident. Somebody needs a tool, they buy it, and a year on there are three of them and nobody remembers why.

Grouping a long list by what each supplier does is boring, quick for an AI, and slow for you. Export a year of spend, add a short "what we buy from them" column, and paste it in. Ask it to label the rows, and nothing else.

Below is a list of our suppliers with annual spend and a short note on
what we buy.
Add a column giving each supplier a purpose group (video calls,
e-signature, file storage, cleaning, printing, and so on). Use the same
group name every time for the same job.
Then list:
- groups that have more than one supplier
- any supplier you couldn't place, instead of guessing
- groups where the note on what we buy is too vague to judge.
Don't add up any spend and don't recommend a product. I'll do the
totals myself.

List: [PASTE: SUPPLIER, ANNUAL SPEND, WHAT WE BUY]

Paste the group column back into your spreadsheet and make a pivot table. The overlaps and the long tail of tiny suppliers show up straight away, and the totals are yours, not the model's.

What you get is a set of leads. Two e-signature tools might be two departments with different contracts and good reasons. Ask the owners before you cancel anything.

Check the dates too. A saving is no use if the contract auto-renewed last month, so build the renewal calendar alongside this. And if your "what we buy" column says "misc services", the grouping will be just as vague. The answer's only as good as that column.