# Recurring Transactions
source: https://developer.mastercard.com/open-finance-us/documentation/products/manage/recurring-transactions/index.md

Recurring Transactions is a service to identify and retrieve details of a
customer's recurring transaction patterns.

The service currently covers recurring payments by the customer (outflows).
You can request information for multiple accounts owned by the same customer
with a single API call.

The response contains a list of transactions with categories (for example,
"Streaming Service" or "Bills \& Utilities").

Each transaction includes:

* normalized payee/payer name
* cadence (in days)
* status
* expected next transaction date
* expected next transaction amount
* historical amount statistics (min, max, mean and median)
* number of transactions
* transaction category
* related transaction IDs

Note: Recurring Transactions is a smart subscription service. You will be billed for each customer you generate a report for in a given month. Additional reports for the same customer in the same month are free.

## Use Cases {#use-cases}

* Subscription management (identifying recurring merchant charges) - easily identify all subscription services so a customer can better understand and optimize their services
* Bill payment - identify all upcoming bills and expected payment dates and amounts
* Personal financial management

## How It Works {#how-it-works}

1. Generate credentials (see [Create a Sandbox Project](https://developer.mastercard.com/open-finance-us/documentation/quick-start-guide/index.md#create-a-sandbox-project)).
2. Create a customer and link accounts via Data Connect (see [Welcome Your First Customer](https://developer.mastercard.com/open-finance-us/documentation/quick-start-guide/index.md#welcome-your-first-customer)).
   * For testing in Sandbox, there are several [transactions profiles](https://developer.mastercard.com/open-finance-us/documentation/integration-and-testing/test-the-apis/index.md#transactions-profiles) available for you to use - for example, **profile_1500** which is available through Finbank Profiles A/B and Finbank OAuth.
3. Refresh accounts to retrieve the latest transaction history - transaction history goes back 6 months and is also refreshed nightly.
4. Call the [Get Recurring Transactions for Customer](https://developer.mastercard.com/open-finance-us/documentation/api-reference/index.md#GetRecurringTransactions) endpoint with a JSON body specifying one or more customer account IDs you want analyzed.
   API Reference: `POST /aggregation/customers/{customerId}/recurring-transactions`

5. Receive the response containing customer-level recurring outflows and per-account recurring outflows.

Note: A minimum of three months of transaction history is needed to identify recurring transactions. Diagram recurring