Analysis for your own money.

The same coffee shop appears as three merchants across a year because the payment descriptor changed. A budgeting app treats them as three, and the category totals it shows you are quietly wrong in a direction you cannot see.

Resolving merchants to a single entity before categorising anything is most of the work, and it is the step consumer tools skip because it is expensive and invisible.

A £900 month with one large purchase and a £900 month of subscriptions are the same number and entirely different situations. The first is a decision; the second is a standing commitment that will happen again next month whether you decide anything or not.

Separating the two changes what the total means, and it is usually the first thing that makes a year of spending legible.

Each individual subscription is small enough not to trigger a reaction, which is precisely why the total is surprising. The useful view is not this month's spend but the trend over a year, with each service's start date marked.

The services worth cancelling are rarely the expensive ones. They are the ones with no usage, which no statement shows you and which have to be inferred.

A year of statement exports, in whatever format your bank produces. CSV, Excel, or a PDF statement all work.

Nothing needs categorising first. That is the part being done for you, and doing it by hand beforehand would produce a worse result more slowly.