Find recurring charges on credit card and bank statements

Look for the same seller charging again at a steady gap. The tool groups charges by seller, then measures the days between them.

A seller counts as recurring when most gaps fall in one range:

• Weekly: 5 to 9 days
• Every 2 weeks: 12 to 17 days
• Monthly: 25 to 36 days
• Every 3 months: 80 to 100 days
• Every 6 months: 170 to 195 days
• Yearly: 340 to 390 days

Charges from one seller on the same day count as one charge. A store with many purchases is checked again amount by amount, so a fixed plan billed through it still shows.

Example: a made-up seller, SUITEMAIL, bills on the 3rd of each month. The gaps are 28 to 31 days, so it lands in Monthly.

Download your account activity as a CSV and drop it into the tool. Twelve months catches monthly and quarterly charges and most yearly renewals.

• American Express: you can download recent activity and your past six billing statements as a CSV from your online account.
• U.S. Bank: the card’s Account page has a Recurring charges view covering the last 18 months.
• Capital One: the app shows upcoming bills and subscriptions, and its fine print says not every recurring charge may be identified.

Drop one file per card or account. Rows that appear in two overlapping files are counted once.

List every tool you pay for, put a name next to each, and decide keep or cancel. The download gives you that list with blank Owner, Seats and Keep or cancel columns.

Yearly cost = last charge × charges per year (52 weekly, 26 every two weeks, 12 monthly, 4 quarterly, 2 every six months, 1 yearly). For usage-based bills it uses the average of the last three charges.

Example: a plan that went from 84.00 to 100.80 dollars a month costs 100.80 × 12 = 1,209.60 dollars a year, and is flagged “Up 20%”.

Two tools for the same job, like two video meeting apps, are flagged too. Pulling every card and account into one owned list is a typical cleanup job.

Download your Amex activity as a CSV and drop it here. Amex offers recent activity plus your past six billing statements, which is about half a year.

A yearly renewal may fall outside six statements. Add an older export if you kept one.

A charge seen once with words like ANNUAL, RENEW or SUBSCR in its description is listed as “Seen once” with a date it may renew.

The text before the asterisk is usually the seller’s short name or the company that took the payment. The detail after it names the product.

• Stripe: card descriptors are a short prefix of 2 to 10 characters, then “* “ and a suffix, 22 characters in all. Stripe’s own example is RUNCLUB* OCT MARATHON.
• Paddle: charges read PADDLE.NET* and the seller’s name, like PADDLE.NET* AEROEDIT. Paddle is the merchant of record for the software companies that sell through it. Look a charge up at paddle.net.

The tool groups PADDLE.NET*, PAYPAL *, SQ * and GOOGLE * charges by the seller after the asterisk and notes who billed it. A code of one to three letters before the asterisk is read the same way.