How to find recurring charges and forgotten subscriptions in your bank statement

The short answer

Take at least three months of statements from every card and account. Sort the transactions by description, and look for the same merchant charging a similar amount at a steady interval. That finds most monthly subscriptions. Yearly renewals, free trials that turned paid, and charges billed through an app store or PayPal need a closer look, covered below.

If you would rather not do it by hand, Pulget reads the same statements and suggests recurring bills, usually once a charge has repeated three times at a steady interval. You confirm each one.

What counts as a recurring charge

A recurring charge comes from the same merchant, at a regular interval, for roughly the same amount. Subscriptions are the obvious case. Rent, a phone plan, insurance, a gym and loan repayments are recurring too, and it helps to see them together, because together they are the part of the month you do not decide again each time.

Two things make them easy to miss. The amount is usually small next to rent or groceries, and the merchant name on a statement rarely matches the name of the service you signed up for.

Find them by hand

1. Collect three months or more. Download a statement or transaction export for every card and account, not only your main one. A subscription is often on the card you used the day you signed up. A spreadsheet export (CSV or Excel) is easier to sort than a PDF.
2. Put everything in one sheet. Paste the rows into one spreadsheet with the columns date, description, amount and account.
3. Sort by description. Identical or near-identical descriptions now sit together. Scan for groups of three or more.
4. Check the interval. For each group, look at the dates. Monthly charges land within a few days of the same date each month; weekly ones on the same weekday.
5. Search for the usual billing names. Search the descriptions for "subscription", "renewal", "monthly", "APPLE.COM/BILL", "GOOGLE", "PAYPAL" and "AMZN". Several services can hide behind one of these.
6. Write down what you find. Merchant, amount, interval, the card it is on, and whether you still use it.

Finding the charges is the easy part. Repeating the check every few months is where it usually stops.

The charges a quick scan misses

• Yearly renewals. One charge a year does not form a group in three months of statements. Look at the last 13 months for single large charges from software, cloud storage, domains or memberships.
• Trials that turned paid. The first charge arrives a week or a month after sign-up, from a merchant name you may not recognize.
• Price rises. The same service at a new amount can look like a different charge. Sort by description, not by amount.
• Charges in another currency. A subscription billed in dollars or euros lands on a manat or lira card at a slightly different amount each month, because the exchange rate moves.
• Charges through a middleman. App stores and PayPal show their own name, not the service's. The app store's or PayPal's own subscription list tells you what is behind them.

How Pulget finds them

Pulget works from the same statements. You upload a PDF, CSV, XLS or XLSX file for each account, check the extracted transactions, and approve them. After each import it looks for recurring charges in your history:

• It needs at least three charges from the same merchant, in the same currency, with every gap between them matching one interval: weekly (5 to 10 days apart), monthly (24 to 38 days), quarterly (80 to 100 days) or yearly (330 to 400 days). One irregular gap and the series is not suggested.
• Charges count as the same bill when their amounts are within 20% of each other, so a price rise from 9.99 to 10.99 stays one bill, while two plans from the same merchant at 9.99 and 15.99 stay separate.
• A charge that looks like a subscription can be suggested sooner, from a single occurrence, but it is never marked recurring until you accept it.

Suggestions appear in the Review inbox. Accept one and Pulget creates the bill and links every earlier matching charge to it, so its whole history shows at once. Later charges from the same bill attach on their own when you import the next statement. Recurring income, such as a salary, is suggested the same way.

Merchant cleanup helps with the naming problem: raw descriptions are matched against 887 known brands, so a descriptor with a terminal number and a city becomes a recognizable name.

What it does not do

Pulget does not cancel anything. You cancel with the merchant, or through the app store that bills you. It does not see charges from statements you have not uploaded, and a yearly subscription needs three charges, so about two years of statements, before the cadence alone can suggest it. It shows no live balance and sends no alerts.

Start with three months

Upload three months of statements from the card you use most, free during preview. Pricing lists the page and file limits of the Standard plan. If you have never tracked without a bank connection, the upload guide walks through the review step, and which files Pulget reads covers formats.