Last month I sat down with a mug of tea, my laptop, and a mild sense of dread, and connected both Emma and Snoop to my Monzo account at the same time. Not to run them side-by-side for 30 days — this was a point-in-time direct debit audit. Every outgoing. Categorised. Cross-referenced. Judged.
I do this every few months because I know I leak money on subscriptions I barely use. But this time I wanted to see whether Emma and Snoop would agree on what counts as waste — and specifically whether either of them would surface what I think of as the “other” problem: the direct debits that sit in a miscellaneous category and never get looked at.
The short answer: they disagreed on about £25 a month of recurring spend. And tracing that gap turned out to be the most useful part of the whole exercise.
What Does a Direct Debit Audit Actually Mean?
A direct debit audit means reviewing every authorised payment leaving your account, categorising it, and deciding whether each one earns its place. Emma and Snoop both do this automatically — but they categorise transactions differently, and that difference matters more than either app admits.
Direct debit audit: a structured review of all recurring payments leaving your bank account, typically monthly, to identify forgotten, duplicate, or overpriced subscriptions before they quietly compound.
Snoop told me my monthly recurring spend was £312. Emma said £287. That £25 discrepancy seemed small at first. It wasn’t.
Setting Up Both Apps on the Same Monzo Account
Both apps connect via open banking — no credentials shared, just the standard consent flow. Snoop synced slightly faster. Emma pulled in roughly 90 days of history on first connection; Snoop went back further, which immediately helped surface annual subscriptions that hadn’t fired recently. That longer look-back is quietly one of Snoop’s best features and it doesn’t really shout about it.
One thing that frustrated me almost immediately: Emma miscategorised several transactions I’d call obvious. My Adobe subscription landed under “Entertainment”. Fine in isolation, but when Emma shows you your Entertainment spend total, it looks enormous — and if you’re not going line by line through the category, you’ll assume you’re overspending on streaming when actually a £54-a-month creative software plan is buried in there. It’s a known UK merchant. It should be in Software. Honestly, I was a bit annoyed by that.
What Each App Actually Flagged as Wasteful
Emma flagged 6 subscriptions as potentially redundant. Three were accurate. One was my home insurance renewal I was already watching. Two were services I genuinely use every day.
Snoop flagged 4. More conservative, but the 2 things it caught that Emma missed were the more interesting finds: a £7.99-a-month subscription to a recipe app I downloaded in 2024 and completely forgot existed, and an annual charge from a VPN provider I’d stopped using when I switched to a different one. Neither appeared anywhere in Emma’s flagged list.
Between them, the actual savings I found were:
- Recipe app: £7.99 a month — cancelled immediately
- Old VPN annual renewal: £43 a year — disputed and refunded in full (didn’t expect that at all)
- Duplicate cloud storage tier: £1.99 a month — cancelled
That’s roughly £145 a year. Not life-changing. But that VPN had been quietly renewing for 18 months after I switched providers. Eighteen months. I was annoyed with myself more than with the app.
Why the ‘Other’ Category Is Where Subscription Leakage Actually Hides
The most valuable thing I did in this whole audit was filter both apps to show only their “Other” or miscellaneous category. Both Emma and Snoop categorise most transactions confidently — but anything they can’t confidently match goes into a catch-all bucket. And that bucket is exactly where zombie subscriptions live undisturbed.
Zombie subscription: a recurring payment that continues after the original use case ends — typically under £10 a month, uncategorised, never appearing in a highlighted “review this” list, just quietly renewing.
In Emma, my Other bucket had 11 transactions across 90 days. Seven were one-offs — a council tax adjustment, a couple of Amazon top-ups. But four were recurring, and Emma had zero flags on any of them. Not highlighted. Not labelled as subscriptions. Just sitting there.
Snoop was cleaner. Its categorisation is noticeably better at recognising UK SaaS merchant names. It correctly identified a Notion subscription and a Canva Pro renewal that Emma had dumped in Other without comment. And yes, I know I could probably get away with Canva’s free tier. That’s a different audit.
The Full Category-by-Category Breakdown
Going through every category in both apps on the same day:
Streaming and entertainment: clean. Three services, all used weekly, both apps agreed on the total. No surprises here.
Utilities and bills: council tax, broadband, and energy. I’m on Octopus Energy — worth checking if your tariff has rolled onto a pricier plan after a fixed term ends, their app makes that easy to spot. Both apps got this right.
Health and fitness: this is where the apps disagreed on labelling. Emma put my gym direct debit under “Health”. Snoop put it under “Subscriptions”. Not functionally different, but it inflated Emma’s health category total and briefly made me think I had a spending problem I don’t actually have.
Software and apps: Emma essentially doesn’t have this as a distinct category — everything gets flattened into Entertainment or Other. Snoop has it, and it’s where Notion, Canva, and a handful of smaller tools landed correctly. This single category difference makes Snoop more useful for anyone who pays for any productivity or creative software, which is loads of us.
Other and miscellaneous: as above. Going through this manually was what made the whole audit worth the faff.
Which App Is Better for a Direct Debit Audit?
For a one-off audit like this, Snoop wins on categorisation depth. Its UK merchant recognition is better, the Software and Apps category is genuinely useful, and the longer transaction history catches annual charges that a 90-day window misses entirely.
But Emma wins on what you do after. The subscription management view is cleaner — upcoming charges are surfaced clearly, you can add notes to flagged items, and the interface actually pushes you toward acting on what you find. Snoop surfaces the problems. Emma is better for managing them on an ongoing basis.
My honest take: run both. Do the audit in Snoop, track and manage the ongoing list in Emma. They complement each other more than they compete — which is something I looked at in a lot more detail when I ran all three apps on the same account for a full month, including Monzo Trends, if you want the full methodology behind this kind of exercise.
Three Things Worth Doing Right Now
If you’ve been meaning to do this and keep putting it off — I get it, it’s a bit of a rainy Saturday job — here’s where to start:
- Connect Snoop to your main current account and immediately filter to the Other or Miscellaneous category. Look for anything recurring you don’t immediately recognise.
- Cross-reference Emma’s subscription list total against your actual Monzo statement — don’t just trust the app figures. The discrepancy I found was entirely in how Emma was counting one annual charge across different months.
- Look back 12 months, not just 30 days. Annual subscriptions are the easiest thing to forget and Snoop’s longer history window is the most practical tool for catching them.
And if you’ve already set up any kind of salary-day automation on Monzo, this audit pairs well with it — clearing out wasteful direct debits means the amount you’re routing into your bills pot is actually accurate, rather than quietly padding someone else’s revenue.
Free tool: Use our Subscription & Direct Debit Audit spreadsheet (free) to find out exactly where your money goes each month. See all our UK finance tools.