How to find every subscription you pay for, using your bank statements

Subscription tracker apps find your recurring payments by connecting to your bank account. You can find the same charges yourself with a year of statements and a spreadsheet, and nobody else gets to see your transactions. It takes about twenty minutes.

The slow part is getting the transactions out of the PDFs, so I use Statement to CSV, a free tool I made. It turns all your statements into one spreadsheet file, right on your computer or phone.

1. Download a year of statements

Get the last twelve months of statements for every bank account and credit card. A shorter stretch misses yearly plans, like an antivirus licence or extra cloud storage, which are charged once a year.

Banking apps and net banking sites keep statements as PDFs, usually under Statements or e-Statements. Card statements tend to arrive by email each month, often as password-protected PDFs.

2. Put every transaction in one spreadsheet

Open statement-to-csv.tukka.dev and drop all the PDFs onto the page at once. If a file is password-protected, type its password when asked. The files are read on your device and never uploaded.

You get back one CSV with every transaction from every statement, oldest first, in five columns: Date, Description, Debit, Credit and File. Open it in Excel, or in Google Sheets with File, then Import.

3. Sort by amount

Sorting by the Debit column is the quickest check. A subscription charges the same amount each time, so its payments end up next to each other. Look for an amount that repeats about a month apart, like 199.00 on the 5th of every month, with a similar description each time.

Small amounts are the easiest to miss. A ₹99 or $2.99 charge disappears in a long statement, and it still comes to ₹1,188 or $35.88 a year.

4. Group by merchant

Sorting misses a subscription whose price went up, because a plan that went from 499 to 649 ends up in two places. Grouping the rows by merchant catches it.

Many descriptions include a reference number or a date that changes every month, so strip the digits out first. In Google Sheets, type Merchant in F1, next to the File column. Put this formula in F2 and fill it down:

=TRIM(REGEXREPLACE(B2, "[0-9]+", ""))

Then choose Insert, then Pivot table. Put Merchant in Rows, and add Debit to Values twice: once summarised by COUNTA and once by SUM. Sort the rows by the COUNTA column. Something charged twelve times is monthly, and four times is quarterly. The SUM shows what it cost you over the year.

5. Decide what to keep

Go down the list and ask four questions about each one:

1. Do I still use it?
2. Am I paying for the same thing twice, like two music apps, or a family plan and my own?
3. Has the price gone up since the first payment?
4. Did a free trial turn into a paid plan without me noticing?

6. Cancel where you signed up

A subscription has to be cancelled where it was set up:

1. Through Google Play: open the Play Store, tap your profile picture, then Payments and subscriptions, then Subscriptions.
2. Through the App Store: on an iPhone or iPad, open Settings, tap your name, then Subscriptions.
3. With UPI AutoPay: open the UPI app you approved it in and look for AutoPay or Mandates, where you can pause or cancel it.
4. By card on a company's website: cancel in your account settings there. If that doesn't work, ask your card issuer to stop the recurring payment.

Check next month's statement to make sure the charge has stopped.

Statement to CSV is free and needs no account: statement-to-csv.tukka.dev. If you'd like to know how it reads a statement, this post explains it.