Export a full year from every account and card you pay from, then group the payments by payee and keep the ones that appear in three or more months. Then read each group by date, because one name often hides several charges.
Mind My Money does this pass on your own computer and asks you about each one before anything is cancelled.
This is for anyone fairly sure they pay for something they have forgotten about and who would like to find out properly, once, rather than scrolling the banking app and hoping it jumps out. It is written from a pass we did over one household's twelve months, across three accounts, and every warning below is something that pass actually ran into.
Download the transactions as a file (CSV or Excel, whatever your bank offers) for the last twelve months, from every current account and every card that anything is paid from. The banking app's list is fine for checking one payment and hopeless for this, because you cannot sort it, group it or see a year at once.
Twelve months is the part people shorten, and it matters. An annual charge shows up once a year, so a three-month window has a three-in-four chance of missing it entirely. In our pass the cloud storage renewal was one line in January and nothing else in the whole year.
Every account means every account. We started with three and were fairly sure that was everything, and it was not: a developer licence, a reading subscription and a music plan were all billed to a card that nobody had thought to include. If two of you share the household costs, the other person's cards belong in the pile too, or the list you end up with is only half the list.
Put all the files into one spreadsheet and add a column with a cleaned-up payee name, with the reference numbers and card numbers that banks tack on the end stripped off, so that the same company always has the same name. Then count, for each payee, how many different calendar months it appears in.
Anything in three or more months is recurring, and below that there is no pattern to look at. In our year, 92 payees passed that test. Most of them are not subscriptions at all, which is the next step.
Take out the payments you would never cancel before you look at what is left: transfers between your own accounts, loan repayments, tax, municipal fees. Then take out the shops. A supermarket appears every month, but there is nothing to cancel, only shopping.
Watch for pay-per-use apps that look like subscriptions. Parking apps and taxi apps turned up in twelve months out of twelve in our list, and they are not subscriptions. You pay each time you use them, and what you can change is how often you use them, which is a different question.
Sort each remaining payee's payments by date and read them as a series. A subscription has the same amount landing on the same day of the month, and shopping has neither, so the two separate almost by themselves once they are in date order.
This is also how you find two subscriptions hiding under one name, which is the one that caught us. The statement had Amazon on it every month, and a Prime membership had genuinely been stopped in July, so Amazon looked dealt with. Read by date there were two series: one of about €6.40 on the 1st, which had stopped, and one of exactly €8.99 on the 25th under a label that looked like ordinary shopping, which had not. They were two Prime memberships, most likely on two different Amazon sites, and they had both billed the same card for six months. The second one was the only real saving the whole exercise found.
While you are reading the series, look at the amounts over time as well. Two streaming services had put their prices up by 11 and 14 percent within the year, and nobody had noticed, because a price rise is a slightly different number on a line you have stopped reading.
Some companies bill every product under one name. APPLE.COM/BILL is the usual example.
In our year it was three separate monthly charges (€9.99, €3.49 and €1.99) on different days of
the month, and the statement could not say which was which. Two of them had started within the
year, so the Apple bill had grown roughly eightfold in ten months, one small charge at a time.
For those, stop reading the statement and open the company's own list. On an iPhone it is Settings, then your name, then Subscriptions. On Amazon it is Your Memberships & Subscriptions. The company knows what each charge is, and the bank never will.
Two things we only learned by opening those lists. Apple's purchase history showed a subscription billed weekly, at €7.99 a week, which on a statement looks like four small unrelated charges a month. And if you are the organiser of an Apple Family Sharing group, your card pays for the other members' subscriptions, but they do not show up in your own list. They are in theirs, on their devices, so an Apple charge you cannot find on your own phone may well be real and belong to somebody else in the family.
By now you have a short list, every item on it named, with its price and how long it has been running. Go down it and ask of each one whether you still want it. Whether it exists is already settled, because your statement says so.
Expect most of the list to survive. From our year, nineteen things looked like savings on paper and one of them was. The rest fell over on facts that were not in any statement: one subscription had already been cancelled, the children watch another every day, and a tariff had changed. That is normal, and it is why a list somebody else draws up from your statement is a list of questions for you rather than a list of things to cancel.
Cancel through the company's own account page. Then go back to the account page and read what it says now. Seeing a confirmation screen is not enough.
We learned that one the hard way. The first attempt at cancelling that Amazon membership went through every screen, pressed the final button, and changed nothing: the membership page still said it would renew on the 24th. The second attempt worked, and the page then said the membership would end on the 24th instead. If we had trusted the first click, the next charge would have arrived as usual and nobody would have known until the statement.
Look at the next statement too. A cancelled subscription is one whose charge stops appearing, and the statement is the only place that shows it.
Mind My Money does this whole pass on your own computer. You sign in to your bank yourself, in a browser window it opens, and it helps you download the year. Then it groups and dates every payment, opens the lists behind labels like Apple's, and goes through what is left with you one item at a time, asking whether to keep each one. It cancels only the ones you say no to, and it checks the account page afterwards to make sure the cancellation took.
Whether handing software your bank login is a reasonable thing to do is a fair question, and it has its own page: is it safe to give a money app your bank login?
Runs on your own computer. Pay what you decide, including nothing.