Subscriptions: every recurring charge, watched and written off

Add up your software subscriptions sometime. Not the total — that hurts — but the last time each one was used. The subscriptions module exists because recurring charges are the only expenses that keep spending without anyone ever deciding anything again.

The registry

Every recurring charge gets a record: vendor, amount, cadence, next charge date, and a renewal state. The obvious ones — your CRM, your email tool — plus the quiet ones: the domain you forgot, the "free trial" that became a line item, the annual plan that renews in the wrong month for cash flow. Nothing here guesses; each subscription is a deliberate entry, and each one carries its history of what's been charged.

The alert before the charge

The sweep watches next-charge dates and raises pre-renewal alerts ahead of time — not "you were billed" after the money left, but "this renews in a week" while you can still act. That's the whole game: a subscription canceled before renewal costs nothing; one canceled after costs its full term. The alert is deduplicated so it nudges once, not daily, because alert fatigue kills alerting.

The tax seam

When a charge actually occurs, the module pushes the write-off into the tax module through a dedicated seam — the expense lands on your ledger with the vendor and plan attached, idempotent by charge, so the same occurrence can never be recorded twice no matter how many times a sync replays. Your P&L and the subscription tracker can't drift apart, because there's only one write path.

One deliberate boundary: this module tracks what your business pays — not what your customers pay you. Customer recurring billing lives with invoices and their recurring profiles; this is the expense side of the ledger.

The honest scorecard

I can't tell you the average business finds three forgotten subscriptions here, because I haven't measured it — no invented statistics in my column. What I can tell you is what the module guarantees: every recurring charge is written down, every renewal is preceded by a warning, and every charge is on the tax ledger without a human re-typing it. Whatever your number turns out to be, you'll find it in one sitting instead of in twelve statements.

The records themselves stay simple on purpose: vendor, amount, cadence, next charge date, renewal state. Complexity in a subscription tracker is where forgotten charges hide — this one is a list you can actually finish reading. So when your team asks "do we still pay for that tool," the answer is a lookup with a renewal date attached, not a quiz for the person with the best memory.

Renewal states do the quiet accounting: active, paused or cancelled — so a tool you meant to cancel but never did shows its true status instead of hiding inside "active." When a subscription ends, its record ends with it; the ledger keeps the history, and next year's "what did we actually spend on software" answers itself.

Related: every charge flows into the tax ledger through a dedicated seam, while customer-side recurring billing lives in invoicing — this module is the expense side of the same spine.

How this compares

Subscription billing platforms like Chargebee and Recurly solve a specific problem — charging your customers on a schedule — and they're good at it. But there's a second subscription problem almost nobody ships a tool for: the recurring charges going the other direction. Your SaaS tools, your memberships, your per-seat plans, all auto-renewing politely while nobody remembers what they cost. The usual tracker is a spreadsheet with a formulas tab someone abandoned in March.

This module is built for the paying side. Every recurring vendor charge is a record with amount, cadence and renewal date; pre-renewal alerts fire before you're billed again, deduplicated so you don't learn to ignore them; and a monthly scorecard shows what recurring spend actually did. The part that saves real money at tax time: charges write off into the tax module automatically, keyed idempotently so a replay never double-counts — your deductible recurring expenses categorize themselves. It's not billing software; it's the mirror image of it. If you also bill customers on subscription, that's invoicing's recurring profiles next door. Knowing what you pay for, before it charges you — that's the whole product.

Try it

Subscriptions lives under Subscriptions in your sidebar. Enter your five biggest recurring charges with their renewal dates, and set one deliberately a week out. The alert you get for it is the exact nudge that saves real money when it's a real subscription you'd have forgotten.