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name: business-profile description: Use when a business's operational knowledge should persist across sessions instead of being rediscovered every time — who each vendor and customer is, the bank narratives they appear under, how and how often they bill, their normal amount range, their category and VAT treatment, plus free-text notes on how each one actually behaves. Learns baselines from transaction history and flags when a pattern CHANGES — a renamed supplier, an amount outside its usual range, a recurring bill that stopped arriving, or a VAT treatment that shifted. disambiguation: The OPERATIONAL profile — counterparties, billing patterns, learned baselines and drift. Market position, competitors and share of voice are business-edge; the obligation calendar and deadlines are accounting-uk-ltd's tracker; posting the transactions is bookkeeping-double-entry.

Business profile — learn it once, notice when it changes

Stops every session starting from zero, and turns "that transaction looks odd" into "that transaction changed, here is what it used to be."

1. What it holds

Per counterparty, learned from history rather than declared:

Narratives	Every bank text this counterparty has appeared under
Cadence	monthly · weekly · quarterly · annual · irregular, inferred from the gaps
Amount range	Observed min / max / median — or an explicit "too few observations"
Category & VAT treatment	What it is normally coded as
Notes	Free text: how this one actually bills — the knowledge that otherwise lives in someone's head

The notes field is the one that pays off. "Worldpay deducts the whole month's fees from a single settlement around the 12th" is exactly the kind of thing that is rediscovered painfully every year (bookkeeping-double-entry/references/transaction-patterns.md §2b).

2. The routine

P=.accounting/business-profile.json

# once, and again whenever you have a fresh batch of history
python3 ~/.claude/skills/business-profile/scripts/profile.py --profile "$P" \
    learn --transactions transactions.json

# every session, before working: what changed?
python3 ~/.claude/skills/business-profile/scripts/profile.py --profile "$P" \
    check --transactions new-transactions.json

# "who is this?" — instead of guessing again
python3 ~/.claude/skills/business-profile/scripts/profile.py --profile "$P" \
    match --narrative "WORLDPAY SETTLEMENT 14/06"

# record what you learn about a counterparty
python3 ~/.claude/skills/business-profile/scripts/profile.py --profile "$P" \
    note --id "WORLDPAY SETTLEMENT" --text "monthly fees deducted from one settlement ~12th"

Run check before working, not after. Its findings change what the rest of the session should look at.

3. What drift detection actually catches

Finding	Why it matters
missed_recurrence	A monthly bill stopped arriving. Cancelled, or a feed gap — and nothing else in the books can see this, because a transaction that never arrived has nothing to appear as
possible_rename	An unknown narrative resembling a known counterparty. Its history is about to be orphaned, and the bank rule keyed on the old name has silently stopped matching
narrative_changed	Known counterparty, new bank text. Same rule consequence
amount_outside_range	Price rise, a different service, or a keying error
vat_treatment_changed	Never fails a control-account proof — the money still balances, so nothing else will flag it
category_changed	Deliberate reclassification, or a mis-code
unknown_counterparty	Classify once, known from then on

missed_recurrence is the one worth having. It is the only check in this whole family that detects an absence. It caught the feed-gap class from the opposite direction to quickbooks-bookkeeping §4 — that reconciles to a balance, this notices a habit that stopped.

amount_outside_range catches the Worldpay pattern for free. A settlement of £640 against an observed £990–£1,010 is flagged without anyone knowing why yet — which is the right order.

4. Every finding is a question

The tool reports what moved against what baseline. It never concludes.

Vendors legitimately rename. Prices rise. Billing moves from monthly to annual. A business changes what it buys. Auto-classifying change as error would train people to dismiss the findings, which is worse than not producing them.

So the output is always "this changed, from this, is that expected?" — and a human answers.

Confidence is stated honestly. A baseline built on fewer than four observations reports insufficient rather than asserting a range it cannot support. Two data points are not a pattern, and a tool that pretends otherwise flags noise until nobody reads it.

5. Narrative matching

Bank descriptions carry dates, references, card suffixes and payment ids that differ every time. Matching raw text means every transaction looks new, so narratives are normalised — volatile parts stripped, the stable stem kept — before comparison.

That is why ACME SUPPLIES LTD REF:88213 and ACME SUPPLIES LTD REF:92100 are one counterparty, while ACME SUPPLIES LIMITED T/A ACME surfaces as a possible rename rather than silently matching or silently not.

Rename detection is deliberately a weak signal offered as a question. "Ltd" becoming "Limited" and a genuinely new vendor sharing a word look identical from here.

6. Where it fits

• Feeds it: financial-document-ingestion (validated rows), a bank/processor export, or the QuickBooks API (quickbooks-api).
• Feeds into it: quickbooks-bookkeeping — a narrative_changed finding is precisely the bank rule that needs fixing before it silently mis-files a month.
• Escalates to: ledger-error-diagnosis when a finding turns out to be a real error.
• Distinct from accounting-uk-ltd's tracker, which holds obligations and deadlines. This holds who and how. Both persist; they answer different questions.

7. Anti-patterns

• Treating a finding as a verdict. It is a question with a baseline attached.
• Learning from unvalidated extractions. Garbage in becomes a confident baseline (financial-document-ingestion §4).
• Building a baseline from two transactions and trusting the range.
• Ignoring missed_recurrence because nothing looks wrong — that is the point of it.
• Not recording what you learn. The note you do not write is the thing rediscovered next year.
• Letting a rename orphan a counterparty's history instead of linking it.