The Standing Orders You Forgot You Pay
Every venue pays monthly for things nobody uses any more. Why recurring costs are invisible in a way one-off costs are not, and the two-hour audit that finds them.
Somebody signed up for something two years ago. It made sense then. It is still being paid, monthly, and nobody has looked at it since.
There are usually several, and together they are a real line.
Why recurring costs hide
They were approved once. A one-off purchase gets scrutinised; a monthly one gets approved once and then never appears as a decision again.
They are individually small. ⚠️ Each one is beneath the threshold at which anyone would examine it, which is exactly why they accumulate.
Nobody owns the list. Purchases have an approver; the ongoing existence of a subscription has nobody.
They outlive their reason. The service replaced something, the something came back, and both are now running.
The person who set it up left. ⚠️ Frequently the whole explanation — and the payment continues perfectly well without them.
What is usually on the list
Consistent across venues:
Software nobody opens. A tool bought for a purpose that was solved another way.
Duplicate tools. Two things that do the same job, because two people each solved the same problem.
Equipment rental past its useful life. ⚠️ Terminals, machines, dispensers — the rental frequently exceeds the purchase price several times over, and nobody recalculates.
Marketing and listings. Directory entries, boosted profiles, a service that was trialled and never cancelled.
Insurance and cover for things you no longer have. A vehicle, a room, a piece of equipment.
Phone and connectivity lines. ⚠️ Almost always at least one line nobody can identify.
The two-hour audit
Once a year, and it pays for itself the first time.
Get the bank statement for one month and list every recurring payment. Not from memory — from the statement. ⚠️ The memory version misses precisely the ones you are looking for.
For each one, name the person who uses it. By name. "The team" means nobody, and that is the finding, not an answer.
For anything nobody can name a user for, cancel it. If it turns out to be needed, it can be restarted — that risk is much smaller than the certainty of continuing to pay for what is unused.
Check the card statements too, not just direct debits. The forgotten ones are disproportionately on somebody's card.
The renewal trap
Annual renewals are worse than monthly ones, because they are invisible for eleven months and arrive as a fait accompli in the twelfth.
⚠️ Note the renewal date the moment you sign anything annual, with a reminder a month before. Without it, the decision is made by not noticing.
The one worth keeping despite the cost
Not everything unused should be cancelled.
Anything that is your record of something. ⚠️ A service holding your history — bookings, accounts, guest data — has a cost of leaving that is not the monthly fee. Check what happens to the data before cancelling, and if the answer is that it disappears, that is a different decision.
What to do differently
Every new recurring commitment gets a named owner and a review date. Two fields, written at the moment of signing.
⚠️ Without the review date it becomes permanent by default, which is how every item currently on the list got there.
A one-off is a decision; a recurring cost is a decision once
Fifty thousand, once discussed by several people
Five thousand a month discussed once, then never again
⚠️ After ten months they are the same amount and only one of them was ever examined.
And nobody is positioned to stop it
⇒ ⚠️ The person who started it has left; the person paying it does not know what it is for. Cancelling requires knowing what something does, and that knowledge is exactly what went missing.
The statement alone will not tell you
Half the line items cannot be identified from the name
⚠️ Do not try to work it out. Ask who uses it. ⇒ The ones nobody claims are the ones you were looking for, and the question takes less time than the investigation.
Three steps, and the blanks are the answer
One list three months of recurring payments
Two write a name beside each: who uses this
Three cancel only the ones with a blank
⚠️ Do not attempt to adjudicate all of them. The blanks are the answer; everything else can wait for another year.
One category not to cancel immediately
Things nobody uses but something depends on
⚠️ A service with no human user may still have a machine using it. ⇒ Post a notice that it will be cancelled in a month. If nobody says anything, cancel it. This costs one month and avoids the outage.
Record the cancellation, not just the saving
Cancelled, unrecorded somebody re-subscribes within a year
Cancelled, with the reason they find the line and do not
⚠️ One line: what was stopped, and why. ⇒ Otherwise the same service arrives again under a new name, bought by someone solving the same problem for the first time.
Prevent the next one at the moment it starts
Whose is it When will it be reviewed
⚠️ A recurring payment with no review date is permanent by default, and the two questions take ten seconds at the point of purchase and two hours to answer four years later.
The other recurring thing nobody looks at
=> The Renewals Nobody Diarised covers licences and certificates that expire on their own schedule.
Both are commitments that renew without a decision. One costs money quietly; the other expires quietly. They fail differently and are worth handling separately.
Three to hold
Total recurring monthly cost. ⚠️ Most operators cannot state this, which is itself the finding.
Number of recurring items with no named user. Should be zero. Will not be.
Items cancelled at the last audit. If it is zero, the audit was not done properly — there is always something.
Where the record has to sit
A subscription list in one person's spreadsheet disappears with that person, which is how several of the items on your current list survived. It needs to sit with the accounts, reviewed on a date somebody is reminded of.
tasteck keeps settlement and accounting records alongside the operational ones, so recurring costs sit next to the takings they are supposed to support.
Nobody is wasting money deliberately. Each of these was a sensible decision, and none of them has been a decision since.
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