Run a subscription audit in a spreadsheet (and actually cancel something)

Subscriptions are designed to be forgotten. A spreadsheet is designed to remember.

Build the list

Pull the last 90 days of card and bank activity. Filter for recurring merchants, meaning anything that hits monthly, yearly, or “every N months.”

Columns that matter:

• Merchant
• Amount
• Cadence (monthly / annual)
• Last charged
• Owner (you / partner / work)
• Keep? (yes / no / decide)

Annual charges often look cheap monthly until you annualize them in a column: monthly_equivalent = annual / 12.

Ninety days catches every monthly charge but misses most annual ones, which is exactly the category that hurts. If your ledger goes back further, sort a full year by merchant and look for names that appear once. A single $180 charge from fourteen months ago is a renewal you’ve already forgotten and will pay again. If you only have 90 days of history, note it and repeat the audit in a quarter rather than pretending the list is complete.

The keep rule

Keep a subscription only if you’d re-buy it tomorrow at today’s price. “I might use it” fails the test. So does “it was free with a trial once.”

The point of writing the rule down before you review the list is that it stops the argument. Without a rule you evaluate each line on its own merits, and each line individually sounds reasonable. With a rule you’re just applying it, and the awkward ones fail fast.

Two edge cases are worth naming. A subscription you use twice a year may still pass if the alternative costs more per use. And a subscription someone else in the household relies on isn’t yours to cancel, which is why the Owner column exists.

Shared plans and zombie seats

Family plans, duplicate streaming logins, old SaaS seats from a side project: these show up only when you look across all cards, not one app’s “manage subscription” page.

Duplicates are the most common finding. Two people in a household subscribing separately to the same service, or a plan that already includes something you’re also paying for standalone. Neither shows up in either account’s own settings page, because neither account knows the other exists. The spreadsheet is the only place both charges sit side by side.

After the audit

Cancel in the same session you decide. Put a calendar reminder 11 months out for anything annual you keep, so renewal isn’t a surprise.

Record what you cancelled and the monthly amount in a small block at the bottom of the sheet. Next quarter that block tells you whether the charges actually stopped, which is not the same as having clicked cancel. Services sometimes bill one more cycle, and a cancellation you never verified is a cancellation that may not have happened.

Then check the result against the ledger a month later. The saved amount either appears or it doesn’t, and only one of those is a real outcome.

No feed does the hard part. It can surface the recurring charges; the audit is you deciding what still earns a place.