Export twelve months of statements for every card and bank account you hold, sort the charges by merchant, and check for five things. That is the full process and it takes an afternoon. If you would rather have someone else do it, the Cash Recovery Report does exactly this, with me reading the statements and a walkthrough call at the end: https://ryzefin.com/products/cash-recovery-report
Start with the export
Every bank and card portal lets you download a CSV. Pull all twelve months for every account, including the corporate cards, the payment processor and any virtual cards. Drop them in one sheet and sort by merchant name. Most of the leaks only become visible once the same vendor's charges sit next to each other.
The five checks
1. Charges in a currency your account is not held in. If you pay a USD invoice from an AED or CAD account, the bank converts it at its own rate, and that rate is 2 to 3% worse than the mid-market rate. It never appears as a fee, but the bank does print the rate it used on the statement line. Compare that rate with the mid-market rate for the same day on https://www.xe.com/currencyconverter/ and the gap is your cost per charge. Multiply your total foreign-currency spend by 2.5% and you have the size of the problem. On a software company we reviewed, foreign-currency spend was about $300k a month, and the report found 3 to 5% of it recoverable, between $108k and $180k a year.
2. Recurring charges that changed amount. Same vendor, same plan, different number from one month to the next. Vendors raise prices mid-contract and rely on nobody checking.
3. Subscriptions with no current user. For every recurring software charge, name the person who logs in. If you cannot, cancel it.
4. Cards that are still active after the holder left. Virtual cards in particular outlive the employee. Look for charges on cards you cannot match to someone on payroll.
5. Monthly plans the vendor sells annually. Most SaaS vendors discount annual billing 15 to 20%. If the tool is staying and the cash flow allows it, switch.
The last check is the balance itself
Add up what you held on average across accounts this year and what it earned. If the answer is nothing, that is a leak too. Anything above the next twelve months of working capital can sit in a savings account, a fixed-income fund, or a T-bill ladder. One client moved excess USD and CAD into a T-bill ladder and lifted the yield on that cash by 4 to 5% a year.
If you would rather have it done
That is most of what a professional statement review finds. When we do it, the Cash Recovery Report covers every item above across twelve months, documents each one with the line from your own statement, and I walk you through the list on a call. $500, five business days, refunded if we find less than $500 a year: https://ryzefin.com/products/cash-recovery-report