Subscription Tracker

Five columns

Service, renewal date, billing cycle, cost, cancel by. Fourteen rows by default, and a monthly-total box under the table.

Currency can be sterling, dollars, euros. That is the whole sheet.

The cancel-by column is the point

Everything else is bookkeeping. This column is the one that saves money.

Annual subscriptions renew silently, and most services notify you the day it happens rather than a fortnight before. Writing the date a week ahead of the renewal — the last day on which cancelling still works — converts a decision you would have missed into one you actually get to make.

Then put those dates in a calendar. The sheet is the audit; the calendar is what interrupts you in time.

Filling it in honestly

Go through a full bank and card statement, not from memory. Twelve months of it, because the annual ones will not appear in a single month.

Check the app stores separately. Subscriptions bought through Apple or Google are billed by them, so they appear on a statement as an unremarkable line with no service name attached, and they are the ones people forget entirely.

Normalise the costs

The billing cycle column exists so the total means something.

An £80 annual plan and a £9 monthly one are not comparable until both are on the same footing. Divide the annual figures by twelve when you compute the total — and note that the annual is usually the better deal, which is exactly why services push it, and why you should only take it on something you have already used for a year.

What people find

The number surprises almost everyone. Individually every line is small, and that is the design: seven pounds a month does not feel like a decision, and fourteen of them is a thousand pounds a year.

Look for the three obvious kinds of waste. Duplicates, where two services do the same job. Dormant ones you have not opened in three months. And the free trial you meant to cancel, which is now a paid subscription in its ninth month.

Review it twice a year

Print it, mark it up, cancel what fails to justify itself, and keep the sheet until the next pass so you can see what came back.

Related: the expense tracker for day-to-day spending, and the sinking funds tracker for the annual bills that are not subscriptions.