How to find card subscriptions you forgot about

Export twelve months of transactions from every company card and bank account, not just the books. Your books may have categorized the line already; the export shows the text the bank sent.

None of these is a rule that holds for every vendor. They are the places to look when the text does not name the tool.

• The first part is often a processor or marketplace, and the vendor follows or is cut off. Read the whole string, including any reference number or website text at the end.
• A company's legal name often differs from its product name. Search the descriptor text on its own and see what the vendor's billing or contact page calls the entity.
• A charge in another currency can print a different entity. The amount in the original currency, on the receipt, is often easier to match than the converted one.
• Annual amounts are round and rare. A single round charge once a year, such as the full price of a team plan, is worth a search through receipts.
• Small, odd amounts repeating monthly are often per-seat plans: the amount divided by the seat price tells you how many seats are billed.

Once you know a line, teach the books so it is coded the same way next month. Intuit's help article on bank rules describes the QuickBooks Online version: you create a rule for money in or out of a chosen bank account, add up to five conditions on Description, Bank text or Amount (Contains, Doesn't contain or Is exactly), and set the action, which can include the category and the payee. Giving the rule a vendor as the payee is what makes the line appear in the vendor report.

Rules apply to transactions waiting for review. Intuit also describes an auto-post option that categorizes and confirms matches without a person looking; the article's wording is that it runs when you sign in, upload a file, or change the rule. Use that for a tool you have already decided to keep, and leave it off for anything under review, so a new charge from the same vendor does not slip through.

Xero has bank rules too, but we could not read its help page for this guide and say nothing here about its steps. Search Xero Central for “bank rules” and follow its page.

Ask the vendor about things the vendor controls (price, seats, the renewal). Ask the card issuer about charges you do not recognize and charges after a confirmed cancellation. The order matters in the second case: raise it with the vendor in writing first, as in cancelling without penalties.

This is general information, not legal advice about a dispute. Your card agreement governs the process.

• Search email for the amount and the date. Receipts usually name the product.
• Search the password manager and the browser's saved sign-ins for the vendor name.
• Ask in the team channel with the descriptor, the amount and the card's last four digits, and a deadline for answers.
• Look at the card's cardholder: a single person's card often explains a tool nobody else has heard of.
• If the merchant is still unknown after those, ask the card issuer what it can tell you about it. Do not ask for a reversal of a charge you later find is yours.

Paste the vendor and total columns into the free audit. It matches names and aliases to the apps we cover and ranks them, in your browser, with nothing sent anywhere.