Go back 13 months, not 12

When you sit down to audit your business subscriptions, the instinct is to pull up the last twelve months of bank statements. Twelve months is a year. A year seems like enough.

It is not quite enough — and the reason is simple.

Annual subscriptions renew once a year. If a subscription renewed thirteen months ago, it will not appear anywhere in a twelve-month window. You will complete your audit thinking everything is accounted for, and then next month a charge will appear that you did not expect — because you did not see it coming.

Going back thirteen months catches it. That one extra month is the difference between a complete picture and one with a gap in it.

Annual subscriptions are the ones most likely to have been forgotten. A monthly subscription takes money every four weeks, which means you see it twelve times a year and it stays present in your awareness even if you are not actively thinking about it. An annual subscription takes money once, and in the eleven months between renewals it is entirely possible to forget it exists.

Those are also the subscriptions most likely to have increased in price. A monthly billing increase shows up the following month and is harder to miss. An annual increase arrives in a renewal email, often phrased in a way that makes the new amount easy to overlook, and you may not see the actual charge until it has already left your account.

Bank statements are the obvious starting point but they are not the whole picture. Several categories of subscription consistently appear somewhere other than the main bank statement.

PayPal recurring payments are particularly easy to lose track of. PayPal makes it straightforward to set up automatic payments and much less straightforward to find and manage them afterwards. Log into PayPal, go to Settings, then Payments, then Manage Automatic Payments. This list often contains surprises.

Phone subscriptions cover everything billed through Apple or Google — apps, storage upgrades, streaming services, anything purchased through the App Store or Google Play. On an iPhone, go to Settings, tap your name, then Subscriptions. On Android, open the Google Play Store, tap your profile icon, then Payments and Subscriptions.

Amazon lists its subscriptions separately under Account, then Memberships and Subscriptions. Prime, Kindle Unlimited, Audible and Amazon Music are all listed there individually and it is worth checking each one.

Rosie