The audit weekend is one Saturday afternoon and one Sunday morning. By Sunday lunchtime you have a complete map of every account, contract, registration, and consent attached to your legal name, with each item graded by what it is doing in your life. Everything that follows in this course depends on this list existing. Without it you are working blind.
This lesson is the combined map-and-grade exercise. The next two lessons (risk-grading and the record file) deal with what to do with the list once it exists.
The shape of the weekend
Saturday afternoon: the surface scan. Two to three hours, kitchen table, kettle on. The job is breadth, not judgment. You are listing everything, in any state, in any condition, that has the legal name attached to it. You are not deciding anything yet.
Sunday morning: the consent pass. Two hours. You go back through the list and mark, against each item, which kind of consent it represents (active, dormant, implied, contractual, statutory). Now you can see the shape of your administrative footprint.
That is it. By midday Sunday you have the document everything else in this course operates on.
What you need on the table
Before you start, gather:
- The last 12 months of bank and credit card statements (paper or PDF)
- Any direct debit and standing order list your bank can produce (most online banking has a one-click report)
- Your email inbox, ready to search
- A pad of A4 or a fresh spreadsheet
- The card wallet you actually use, plus the drawer where the dead cards live
You do not need every old paper file. The credit card statements alone will surface most active relationships. The dead drawer surfaces the dormant ones.
Saturday: the categories to map
Go through these in order. For each one, list every named account, registration, or contract.
1. Banking and money. Current accounts, savings, credit cards, store cards, PayPal, Wise, crypto exchanges, brokerage accounts, ISAs, pensions, premium bonds. Note the account name (yours, joint, business), the institution, and roughly what it is for.
2. Government registrations. HMRC (PAYE if employed, self-assessment if not), DWP (any benefits, including state pension records), DVLA (licence and any vehicle keepership), Passport Office, NHS number, electoral register entry, council tax account, council housing or housing benefit.
3. Utilities and rolling household services. Gas, electricity, water, broadband, mobile contract, TV licence (or its absence on file), home insurance, contents insurance, car insurance, breakdown cover, any subscription that auto-renews (Netflix, Amazon Prime, gym, magazine, dating app).
4. Property and vehicles. Tenancy agreements (current and past), mortgage, leasehold management arrangements, freehold registration, vehicle V5C(s), anything held in your name at the Land Registry.
5. Professional and credit. Professional body memberships, trade union membership, credit reference agency files (a free statutory report from Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion shows you what is held), any County Court Judgments, IVA, or bankruptcy records.
6. Communications and consents you actively gave. Mailing lists you signed up to, charities you donate to, political party membership, online accounts where you ticked the marketing box, social media accounts in your real name.
7. Dead and dormant. Closed accounts where the institution still has your data on file, old gym memberships, ex-employer records, university alumni lists, accounts you stopped using but never closed.
By the end of Saturday you will likely have between 60 and 100 line items. If you have many fewer, you have missed a category. If you have far more, you have probably double-counted (e.g. listing each credit card and the underlying current account separately when they share an institution).
Sunday: the consent pass
Now you take the same list and add a column. Against each item, mark one of:
- A (active). A consent you positively gave and that is currently in operation. Most subscription services. Most marketing list signups. Most banking products you currently use.
- D (dormant). A consent you gave at some point but that is no longer doing anything you care about. Old marketing lists. Closed accounts where the institution still holds data. Memberships you forgot to cancel.
- I (implied). A consent the system reads into your living circumstances. Council tax. Most utility services on a standard contract. Healthcare data sharing on the NHS.
- C (contractual). A consent created by a signed agreement that you are still inside. Tenancy. Mortgage. Active employment.
- S (statutory). Not a consent at all but an obligation Parliament has placed on you while you remain in particular circumstances. PAYE income tax while employed. Vehicle keepership obligations while you have a V5C.
The point of the column is not to act on any of it yet. It is to see, at a glance, the shape of your footprint. Most people are surprised by how much sits in D (dormant) and how little of the rest is genuinely S (statutory and unavoidable). The system encourages a vague feeling that everything is mandatory. The list shows you what actually is.
A worked example, one row
Item: Halifax current account, in legal name, sole, opened 2007 Category: Banking Consent type: Active (the account is in use). Within the account: marketing email opt-in (Active), data sharing for credit reference purposes (Contractual, embedded in account terms), data sharing with HMRC under common reporting standards (Statutory, while UK resident).
That single row breaks the bank account into the four different consents stacked underneath it. Most of your rows will not need this much detail; for the simple ones, one consent type suffices. But noting where one row contains layered consents trains the eye for module 4.
What you have at the end
A two-page document, give or take. Every account named. Every consent typed. Nothing decided yet. You have stopped guessing about the shape of your administrative life and started seeing it. The next lesson takes this list and decides which items you act on, in what order, with what risk. The lesson after that builds the folder you keep all of it in.
Hold the line
The first instinct, halfway through Saturday afternoon, is to close the list and start drafting letters. Resist that. The audit is the foundation. Skipping it is the most common reason readers fail at the practical half of this course: they pick a single battle (the council tax, the V5C) without seeing the whole footprint, and the system, looking at the rest of the file, escalates the chosen battle in a way the reader did not see coming.
One Saturday afternoon. One Sunday morning. Then you have a document that earns the rest of the course.