audit-recurring-subscriptions

name	audit-recurring-subscriptions
category	money
description	Find, classify, and review recurring charges using statements, receipts, contracts, and actual use. Use when reducing spend or preventing unwanted renewals.

audit-recurring-subscriptions

Build a complete renewal picture before cancelling. Similar charges can belong to different accounts, commitments, or people.

When to use

• Use for household or small-business subscriptions, memberships, software, storage, media, and service plans.
• Check current provider terms and local rights directly when deadlines or disputes matter.

Procedure

1. Set the accounts, people, entities, currencies, and lookback period in scope.
2. Search bank and card statements, app stores, email receipts, invoices, expense systems, and renewal notices.
3. Normalize merchant descriptors and group likely recurring charges without merging uncertain matches.
4. Record service, payer, account owner, amount, cadence, currency, next renewal, payment method, contract term, and notice deadline.
5. Verify access and actual use with the owner; identify duplicates, forgotten trials, overlapping tools, and orphan accounts.
6. Classify keep, downgrade, consolidate, cancel, investigate, or transfer ownership.
7. Before action, record data export, dependency, retention, early termination, refund, and access consequences.
8. Execute approved changes through official channels and retain confirmation numbers, dates, and screenshots or receipts.
9. Reconcile later statements to confirm the charge stopped or changed.

Failure plan

• Do not cancel shared, safety, storage, domain, security, or business-critical services without the owner and dependency check.
• Never expose full payment credentials in the audit.
• Treat unfamiliar charges as an investigation, not automatically as fraud.
• Keep renewal terms unverified until checked against the current contract or provider.

Done

• Recurring charges are reconciled to owners, terms, use, and renewal dates
• Approved actions preserve needed data and dependencies
• Changes are confirmed against subsequent billing, with unresolved items tracked