Subscriptions & debts
Most forgotten subscriptions aren't hidden. They're spread across your Apple Account, two cards and a yearly renewal you agreed to fourteen months ago. Here's how to pull them into one list and stop being surprised.
If you want to know how to track subscriptions properly, the hard part isn’t the tracking. It’s the finding. A streaming service sits on one card, a cloud storage plan on another, an app trial quietly turned into an annual plan, and a gym membership comes out of the account you rarely open. Each charge is small enough to ignore and regular enough to add up.
This guide walks through where subscriptions actually hide, how to turn them into one honest monthly number, and how to get warned early enough to cancel. The last part shows how MoneyFlux does it, including what it does not do.
Subscriptions are billed in two different ways, and you need to check both.
A complete list needs both sources. Neither one alone is enough.
Apple keeps every subscription billed through your Apple Account in one place. According to Apple’s support page on cancelling subscriptions, the steps on iPhone are:
If there’s no cancel button, or you see an expiration date in red, the subscription is already cancelled and will run until the end of the period you paid for. Apple also notes that a free trial should be cancelled at least 24 hours before it ends if you don’t want it to renew. On a Mac you’ll find the same list in the App Store under your account, and on the web at account.apple.com.
The list also shows inactive subscriptions. Scroll through them: an app you cancelled once may have been resubscribed to on another device, and the history helps you remember what you’ve tried.
Two things the Apple list won’t show you:
For everything else, go to the statements. One month is not enough. Pull the last 12 months for every card and account you have, because annual renewals only show up once a year.
Look for:
If you read the statements in your bank’s app, this is slow: scrolling, tapping, squinting. It’s faster to export a statement file once and look at it in one place. Our guide on importing a bank statement instead of typing every expense shows how to get the file out of the bank.
Once you have the list, the next mistake is adding the numbers up wrong. A yearly plan at 59.99 and a monthly one at 6.99 aren’t comparable as written. The fix is to normalise everything to one period.
| Subscription | Billed | Amount | Monthly equivalent |
|---|---|---|---|
| Video streaming | Monthly | 15.49 | 15.49 |
| Music | Monthly | 10.99 | 10.99 |
| Cloud storage | Annually | 29.99 | 2.50 |
| VPN | Every 2 years | 95.76 | 3.99 |
| Gym | Every 4 weeks | 40.00 | 43.33 |
The amounts above are made-up examples to show the arithmetic, not real prices. Two things fall out of it:
Keep totals per currency. If you pay some subscriptions in USD and others in CAD or UAH, adding them into one number means picking an exchange rate, and that number will be wrong next week. Two honest totals are better than one invented one. (More on why in our post on tracking expenses in several currencies.)
With the full list and the real cost in front of you, go line by line. A few questions that work:
Nothing here is financial advice. It’s housekeeping. Some subscriptions earn their price and should stay. The point is to choose, rather than to keep paying by default.
However you track subscriptions, the cancel button lives with whoever bills you: in Settings → your name → Subscriptions for Apple-billed ones, or in the account settings on the company’s website for direct ones. Deleting an app does not cancel its subscription. Neither does removing a card from your wallet; the merchant will usually try again and may keep the account open with a balance owed.
The audit is a one-off. Staying on top of it needs three habits, and a subscription tracker app only helps if it does them for you.
A spreadsheet can do the first. The second and third are where spreadsheets usually die, because nobody updates them.
MoneyFlux keeps subscriptions in the Commitments tab, alongside money you’ve lent or borrowed. Commitments is part of MoneyFlux Premium ($4.99/month or $29.99/year in the US, with a 7-day free trial on the annual plan; local prices differ).
You add a recurring payment with the merchant, the amount and currency, the category, the account it’s paid from, and how often it charges: monthly, annually, or a custom interval such as every 4 weeks or every 2 years. While you fill it in, the form shows what it counts as per month, for example “Counts as €12.99 per month in your summary.”
You don’t have to start from a blank form. If a charge is already in your transactions, you can turn it into a recurring payment from the transaction itself.
The top of Commitments shows Monthly cost, with the number of active subscriptions, and Annual cost, normalised by frequency, so the yearly cloud plan and the monthly streaming plan land in the same total. Totals are grouped per currency; MoneyFlux doesn’t convert between currencies.
Each payment also has its own page with the next charge date, its monthly equivalent, and every charge that has linked to it, with a chart of what you’ve paid all-time. Seeing two years of one subscription added up is often what settles the keep-or-cancel question.
When a payment is due within three days, a banner appears at the top of Commitments, along the lines of “Netflix charges in 2 days — €12.99 leaves Mono Black on 14 March.” You can also turn on a reminder for each payment and choose how many days before the charge it arrives, from 0 to 30. For a trial you plan to cancel, set it a few days out so you have time to act. Reminders are local notifications scheduled on your iPhone.
This is the part that keeps the list honest without retyping anything. When you import a bank statement, rows whose description contains the merchant name are linked to that recurring payment and tagged as recurring. The next Netflix charge in your statement files itself under Netflix. During the import review you can also link a row to an existing recurring payment by hand, or start tracking a new one.
Statement import works with files you export yourself: PrivatBank and Monobank CSV, several Ukrainian banks’ PDFs, Scotiabank PDF, and OFX/QFX/QBO files from most banks. The file is read on your phone and is not uploaded. Your first import is free; after that, import is part of Premium. There is no automatic bank connection.
When you cancel a subscription with the merchant, mark it Cancelled in MoneyFlux. It drops out of your monthly total but stays in a collapsed Cancelled group, so the history of what you paid isn’t lost. Pause does the same for something on hold, and cancels its pending reminder. Neither stops the actual charge; only the merchant or Apple can do that.
Try it in MoneyFlux: go to Commitments, tap +, choose Recurring payment, and add the three subscriptions you’re least sure about. Set the reminder to 3 days. Then import last month’s statement and check that each charge linked itself.
Being honest about limits saves you from relying on something that won’t help:
Subscriptions are only one part of what leaves your account every month. Once they’re under control, the next step is the rest of the picture: where your money goes every month. And if someone owes you money on a schedule, the same Commitments tab handles money you lent to friends. The full list of what the tab does is on the Commitments feature page.
Open Settings, tap your name at the top, then tap Subscriptions. That list only covers subscriptions billed through your Apple Account; anything you pay directly to a company with your card will only show up on your bank or card statement.
Go through 12 months of statements for every card and account, not just one month, so annual renewals show up. Look for the same merchant repeating, round amounts on the same day each month, and small charges you don't recognise.
No. MoneyFlux tracks them, adds them up and reminds you before they charge. You cancel with the merchant or in your Apple Account, then mark the payment cancelled in the app so it leaves your monthly total.
No, Commitments is part of MoneyFlux Premium. If your subscription lapses you keep read-only access to what you recorded.
No. There is no bank connection. You export a statement file from your bank and import it; the file is read on your phone, and rows that match a recurring payment you set up are linked to it.
