How much is your business paying for software you have forgotten about?

There is a specific kind of financial leak that affects almost every small business owner I have ever spoken to. It is not dramatic. It does not show up as a crisis. It just quietly continues, month after month, while you are busy doing everything else.

It is the subscription you signed up for eighteen months ago and have not opened since.

Most people, when they think about it, can name at least one. The project management tool they tried during a busy period and then went back to their notebook. The design app that seemed useful at the time. The cloud storage upgrade that made sense when they were moving files around but is now just sitting there, billing.

What most people cannot tell you is how many of these they actually have, or what they add up to over a year.

Subscriptions are designed to be easy to start and easy to forget. A free trial converts to a paid plan and the email announcing it arrives at a busy moment and gets filed away. An annual renewal goes out and the amount is just different enough from what you remembered to be slightly confusing — but not different enough to trigger real alarm.

So you leave it. You mean to look into it. Another month goes by.

The amounts are individually small enough that none of them feel worth the effort of investigating. Collectively, they are often surprising.

Going through your subscriptions properly takes about an hour. You need your bank statements — going back thirteen months, not twelve, because annual subscriptions renew once a year and a twelve-month window can miss one that renewed just before you started looking. You also need to check your PayPal recurring payments, your phone subscription list and your Amazon account separately, because a lot of things hide there.

The process is straightforward. You list everything, identify anything you do not recognise, decide what to keep and what to cancel, and set reminders for renewals so you are never caught out again.

The part most people find unexpectedly useful is having a way to identify the mystery entries. STRIPE followed by a company name you do not recognise. PAYPAL* followed by something that means nothing to you. Most people look at these and think "I'll deal with that later" — and later never comes. Having a link that runs a search on that exact text, and another that takes you straight to the cancellation process if you decide you don't want it, removes that friction entirely.

Most people who do a proper subscription audit find something they had genuinely forgotten about. Often more than one thing.

The amounts vary — some people find £20 a month, some find considerably more — but the more consistent finding is the relief of actually knowing what is leaving the account and why.

There is also usually at least one subscription that has increased in price since you signed up, buried in a renewal email you skimmed. Subscription prices go up regularly and the new amount is often presented in a way that is easy to miss.

Rosie