Binta reviewed her bank statement and found a monthly charge she didn’t recognize. Nobody on her team could explain it either. It had been running for eleven months.
What a Ghost Expense Actually Is
A ghost expense is a recurring charge that keeps getting paid without anyone actively deciding to keep it. It’s not fraud, and it’s rarely deliberate. It’s a subscription nobody cancelled, a service nobody’s using anymore, or a fee that started small and was never questioned.
Common Examples
- A software subscription the team stopped using months ago
- A duplicate service, paying for two tools that do the same thing
- A small monthly fee that was approved once and never reviewed again
- An auto-renewed contract nobody remembered signing up for
Signs You’re Paying for One
- A charge on your statement you can’t immediately explain
- A subscription tied to an employee who no longer works there
- A recurring cost that feels “too small to worry about”
- Nobody on your team can say what a specific line item is actually for
How to Audit Recurring Charges
Pull your last three months of bank and card statements and list every recurring charge, no matter how small. For each one, ask a single question: would we sign up for this again today, knowing what we know now? If the answer isn’t a clear yes, it’s worth investigating.
A Simple Monthly Habit
Set fifteen minutes on the same day each month to scan your statement for recurring charges. It doesn’t need to be a full audit every time, just enough to catch something new before it becomes another eleven-month mystery.
Binta’s charge turned out to be a trial subscription that auto-converted to paid, tied to an employee who’d left the company months earlier. Cancelling it took five minutes. Finding it took eleven months longer than it should have.
How JS Morlu Gambia Can Help
JS Morlu Gambia can help businesses review recurring transactions and expense categories as part of stronger bookkeeping and financial controls, making it easier to identify subscriptions, duplicate services, or forgotten charges before they accumulate. Our reconciliation and reporting support can also help keep these recurring costs visible rather than allowing them to disappear into the background of a busy business.