With the rise of software and subscription-based business models, it's important to have a system to manage and track the services you pay for. Luckily, Google Sheets is the only tool you need to record and manage these check-ins.
Why should you use Google Sheets to track subscriptions?
There are several ways to track your monthly subscriptions, including mobile app stores (Google Play or App Store) and paid subscription tracking apps. However, app stores can only track payments made within the platform, and paid tracking apps are often just another subscription in your monthly bill.
In contrast, Google Sheets is completely free, lightweight, scalable, and cross-platform. It's also easy to use and supports formulas, filters, and conditional formatting to aggregate costs, highlight upcoming renewals, and sort subscriptions by category. It supports collaboration, which can be useful for couples and family members, and spreadsheets can easily be shared or exported in a variety of formats.
How to set up subscription tracking in Google Sheets
Creating a subscription tracking tool isn't as easy as installing an app and importing your existing subscriptions. This takes quite a bit of time, especially when you don't use a template.
For this reason, we created a subscription tracking spreadsheet with column headers for subscription name, subscription category, billing frequency and amount charged, subscription date, monthly cost, annual cost, lifetime cost, and action to take (for example, cancel or renew).

Column Category and Frequency There are drop-down fields for registration information. Formulas based on frequency, amount, and billing start date automatically calculate the monthly, annual, and lifetime cost of the subscription.
The formula for calculating monthly costs is as follows:
=IFS(C2="Annually",F2/12,C2 = "Weekly", F2*4, C2 = "Monthly", F2)
Monthly costs are calculated based on the subscription frequency specified. The paid amount is divided by 12, multiplied by 4, or the entire amount is inserted into the cell.
For the annual cost of your subscription, multiply the monthly cost by 12. To calculate the lifetime cost, use the formula to find the number of weeks, months, or years since the first payment and multiply by Paid money:
=IFS(C2 = "Weekly", F2 * INT((TODAY()-D2)/7), C2 = "Monthly", (DATEDIF(D2,TODAY(), "m") * F2), C2 = "Annually", (H2 * DATEDIF(D2, TODAY(),"y")))
Last column, Actionwhere you can specify to renew, cancel, or even upgrade your subscription
You've got a quick and easy way to manage your service subscriptions in Google Sheets. For a challenge, try using Apps Script to set up automatic email reminders. You can have Gemini generate a code, add it to your spreadsheet, and configure the trigger to run when renewal is due within a specific number of days. Also, consider canceling subscriptions that no longer provide the same value.