subscription-audit

---
name: subscription-audit
description: Builds a register of every recurring payment leaving the business, with who owns it, what it costs a year, how it can actually be stopped, and what happens if you stop it. Use when nobody can say what all the standing orders and card payments are for, before a renewal, or when cash is tight and the outgoings need cutting without breaking anything.
---

# Find out what leaves your card every month that nobody remembers signing

You give this twelve months of bank statements and card statements, including the personal card that somehow pays for the booking system. You get back one register of every recurring payment, each with a plain English name, an owner, the cost for a year, whether it is a Direct Debit or a card payment, and the actual mechanism for stopping it. It separates cancelling the payment from cancelling the contract, because those are different things and confusing them is how a business ends up with a debt collector instead of a saving. It never guesses what a payment was for.

## What it does

1. **Get every account, not just the current account, and go back twelve full months.** A hospitality business typically pays out of four places: the business current account, the business debit card, a credit card in the owner's name, and a PayPal or Stripe balance that quietly funds two or three tools. Ask for statements from all of them, plus the last twelve months of whichever accounting software is in use if there is one. Twelve months is the minimum, because annual subscriptions only appear once and an audit built on three months of statements will miss the £480 renewal that lands in March. Write at the top of the output which accounts were covered and which were not, so the owner knows how complete the answer is. A register that silently omits the owner's personal card is worse than no register, because it will be trusted.

2. **Pull out every payment that has happened more than once to the same payee, and keep the raw text.** Work from the statement narrative exactly as printed, including the mangled version: "SUMUP *DUBLINIE", "PADDLE.NET* TOASTTAB", "GOOGLE *GSUITE_FOX". Group by that raw string first and only then try to name the company, because the same supplier appears under three different narratives and two of them look like something else entirely. Anything appearing twice or more at a consistent interval goes in the register. Anything appearing once goes in a separate list headed "one-off, or an annual you have only seen once", which is checked against the previous year rather than dropped.

3. **Build one row per subscription, with the annual cost computed rather than quoted.** Columns: payee as printed on the statement, what the company actually is, what it is for in plain words, payment method (Direct Debit, card, invoice, standing order), account or card it leaves from, amount, currency, frequency, date first seen, date last seen, number of payments in twelve months, and total paid in twelve months. Compute the annual figure from the payments you can see, not from the headline price on the supplier's website, because the two differ once VAT, currency conversion and a price rise are in play. Sort the register by the twelve-month total, largest first. Owners consistently guess this order wrong, and the thing they are most annoyed about is rarely the thing costing the most.

4. **Give every line an owner and a purpose, and make the blanks visible.** Against each row write the name of the person who signed up for it and the name of the person who would notice tomorrow if it stopped. Where those are the same departed employee, write that. Where nobody can answer either question, the row goes into a list headed "nobody claims this", which is the single most valuable output of the whole exercise. In a restaurant the usual occupants of that list are a website builder from a redesign that never finished, an EPOS add-on for a feature nobody turned on, a stock app bought during lockdown, and a music streaming account running alongside the PRS and PPL licences. Do not cancel anything from that list on the strength of it being unclaimed. It is a list of questions, and the next three steps are how they get answered.

5. **Show each line's price history, because the rises are the point.** For every subscription, list each distinct amount paid in the twelve months with the date it changed. A subscription that went from £29 to £34 to £41 without anyone noticing is more interesting than one that has been £50 throughout, and per-user tools do this every time someone new is added and nobody is removed. Where a price changed on a Direct Debit, note whether advance notice was given. The Direct Debit Guarantee states that "If there are any changes to the amount, date or frequency of your Direct Debit the organisation will notify you (normally 10 working days) in advance of your account being debited or as otherwise agreed", so an unannounced change is worth raising with the supplier and, if it was an error, with the bank.

6. **Find the duplicates, the overlaps and the seats nobody is sitting in.** Read the register as a whole rather than line by line and group it by job: taking bookings, taking payments, rotas, stock, accounts, marketing, music, broadband, phones. Two tools doing one job is the commonest finding. Then check headcount against per-seat tools: a rota app billed for twelve users in a team of seven is a 40% overcharge that renews automatically forever. Finally check for trials that converted. A card payment that starts at a round small number and jumps at month two or month four is a converted free trial, and it is worth naming as such because it tells the owner nobody made a decision to buy that thing.

7. **Write down how each one can actually be stopped, and say plainly what stopping the payment does not do.** There are three different levers and they have three different consequences. A Direct Debit can be stopped at the bank: the Guarantee says "You can cancel a Direct Debit at any time by simply contacting your bank or building society. Written confirmation may be required. Please also notify the organisation." A recurring card payment is a continuing authority you gave, and regulation 67(4) of the Payment Services Regulations 2017 provides that "the payer may withdraw its consent to the execution of a series of payment transactions at any time with the effect that any future payment transactions are not regarded as authorised". An invoiced contract has neither lever and can only be ended on its own notice terms. Against every row record which of the three applies, and record the contract notice period and renewal date where a contract exists. Then write the warning once, in the owner's own document: stopping the payment does not end the contract, and money still owed under a live contract remains owed. That sentence is what stands between a tidy register and a county court claim.

8. **Check what the business is entitled to reclaim, and whether there is an invoice at all.** For each line, note whether a VAT invoice in the business's name has ever been received. Many software subscriptions bought on a personal card have never produced one, which means the cost has never reached the accounts and the VAT has never been considered. Note separately any supplier that is plainly overseas, because HMRC's guidance on the place of supply of services describes the reverse charge in these terms: "You, the customer, must act as if you are both the supplier and the recipient of the services", with output tax in box 1 and input tax in box 4 of the return. Do not attempt the treatment. Flag the line, say which supplier appears to be outside the UK, and hand it to the bookkeeper.

9. **Produce three lists with the year's money on each, and a date against every action.** List one, cancel: what it is, who confirmed nobody needs it, the annual saving, the lever to use, and the notice deadline if there is one. List two, renegotiate or downgrade: the per-seat tools with empty seats, the plans that have drifted up, the annual contracts with a renewal date inside ninety days, each with the figure at stake. List three, keep: named and priced, so that next year's audit starts from a list that has already been decided rather than from the statements again. Total the first two lists. That total is the answer to the question the owner actually asked.

## Then it checks

1. Every row names the statement narrative it came from, the account it leaves, and at least two dated payments, so no row rests on a single transaction.
2. The twelve-month total on every row equals the sum of the payments listed for that row, and the register total equals the sum of the rows.
3. Every row is marked Direct Debit, card, standing order or invoice, and every row carries the stopping lever that matches that method, with no row saying "cancel it" without saying where.
4. Every row has an owner and a purpose, or appears in the "nobody claims this" list, and no row is left blank in both columns without appearing there.
5. No line appears on the cancel list that is a payment towards something already owed, such as premium finance, a lease, an equipment hire agreement or a tax arrangement, and the output says explicitly that these were checked for and excluded.
6. The output names which accounts and cards were covered, and names any the owner did not provide.

Any check fails: name it, redo that step once. Failed twice: say what is wrong and stop.

## Rules
- Public information only.
- Never invent a fact, a number or a quote.
- Anything sent in someone's name says whose name it is.
- Never cancel, stop, or instruct a bank or a supplier to do anything. This produces a list and the owner acts on it. An automated cancellation of the wrong Direct Debit can stop an insurance premium, a licence or a tax payment, and the business finds out when the cover lapses.
- Never guess what an unidentified payee is. Write the raw narrative, write "not identified", and put it in the questions list. A confident wrong guess gets a working subscription cancelled and a useless one kept.
- Never treat a Direct Debit cancellation as ending a contract, and never present a saving as banked before the contract's notice period has been checked. The money only stops when both the payment and the agreement have stopped.
- Do not rely on the new subscription rules in the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 for anything the business bought in the business's name. Those protections are written for consumers and, on the government's own published response, the regime is "anticipated to commence in spring 2027". The levers in step 7 are the ones available today.
- This output is a working document prepared for the owner's accountant or bookkeeper to check before anything is cancelled, and for the owner's solicitor where a contract has a notice period or a minimum term. It reads statements and states arithmetic. It is not advice on your contracts or your tax.

## Built from
- Pay.UK, "The Direct Debit Guarantee", https://www.directdebit.co.uk/direct-debit-guarantee/, no publication date shown on the page, read 14 September 2026: the advance notice rule used in step 5, the refund wording, and the cancellation route in step 7.
- HM Government, "The Payment Services Regulations 2017", regulation 67, https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2017/752/regulation/67, read 14 September 2026: the right to withdraw consent to a series of payment transactions, which is the card-payment lever in step 7 and the reason card subscriptions are treated differently from Direct Debits.
- Department for Business and Trade, "Government response to consultation on the implementation of the new subscription contracts regime", https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/consultation-on-the-implementation-of-the-new-subscription-contracts-regime/outcome/government-response-to-consultation-on-the-implementation-of-the-new-subscription-contracts-regime-web-accessible-version, 2 April 2026, read 14 September 2026: the commencement expectation and the consumer scope, which is why the rules tell the owner not to rely on the new regime for business purchases.
- HM Government, "Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024", Part 4 Chapter 2, https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2024/13/part/4/chapter/2, read 14 September 2026: the statutory shape of reminder notices and cooling-off rights, read to establish exactly what does and does not cover a business buyer.
- Department for Business and Trade, "New measures unveiled to crack down on subscription traps", https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-measures-unveiled-to-crack-down-on-subscription-traps, 18 November 2024, read 14 September 2026: the scale of unwanted subscriptions in the UK, which is why step 4 makes the unclaimed list the headline output rather than a footnote.
- HM Revenue & Customs, "Place of supply of services (VAT Notice 741A)", https://www.gov.uk/guidance/vat-place-of-supply-of-services-notice-741a, last updated 29 September 2022, read 14 September 2026: the reverse charge wording used in step 8 to flag overseas software suppliers for the bookkeeper rather than treating them in the register.

# subscription-audit

## You are given
A folder of UK bank and card statements for one small business, covering twelve months. Formats vary: PDFs, CSV exports, screenshots. There may be several accounts and several cards, including a personal card used for business tools. There may also be a list of staff names and headcount. Read every file before writing anything.

## Produce
Three files in the working folder.

1. `subscriptions-register.csv`, one row per recurring payee, columns in this exact order:
`payee_raw` (the statement narrative exactly as printed), `payee_name` (the company, or `not identified`), `what_it_is_for` (plain words, or `unknown`), `account` (which account or card it leaves), `method` (direct debit / card / standing order / invoice / unknown), `currency`, `amount_latest`, `frequency` (monthly / annual / quarterly / irregular), `payments_in_12m`, `total_paid_12m_gbp`, `first_seen` (YYYY-MM-DD), `last_seen`, `price_changes` (semicolon list of `YYYY-MM-DD:amount`), `owner` (person, or `nobody claims this`), `source_files`.
Sort by `total_paid_12m_gbp` descending.

2. `subscriptions-questions.csv`, one row per open question, columns:
`question_id`, `payee_raw`, `question_type` (one of: not identified, no owner, price rose without notice, duplicate of another line, per-seat count exceeds headcount, free trial converted, appears overseas for VAT, no VAT invoice seen, single payment only), `detail`, `annual_amount_at_stake_gbp`.
Sort by `annual_amount_at_stake_gbp` descending, blanks last.

3. `subscriptions-summary.md`, under 700 words, British English, no em dash characters. Three headed lists: `Cancel`, `Renegotiate or downgrade`, `Keep`. Every item gives the plain name, the annual cost, the account it leaves, and the stopping lever in one of exactly these three forms: `Direct Debit - cancel at the bank, then notify the supplier`, `Card - withdraw the continuing authority with the card issuer, then notify the supplier`, `Invoiced contract - notice period applies, check the agreement`. End with the total of the first two lists.

## Rules
- Only a payee with two or more payments in the twelve months goes in the register. Single payments go in `subscriptions-questions.csv` as `single payment only`.
- Compute `total_paid_12m_gbp` by adding the payments you can see. Never take a price from a supplier's website and never annualise a single payment.
- Never guess an unidentified payee. Write `not identified` and raise a question.
- Never put a payment towards something already owed on the `Cancel` list: premium finance, equipment leases, hire purchase, loan repayments, HMRC arrangements, licence fees. Route these to `Keep` with the note `obligation, not a subscription`.
- Every `Cancel` item must carry the sentence `Stopping the payment does not end the contract.`
- Do not contact a bank or a supplier, do not cancel anything, and do not submit anything anywhere.

## Return
The three file paths, the number of statements read, the accounts covered and any the owner did not supply, the count of register rows, the twelve-month total across the register, and the count of questions by `question_type`.