One of the things I was most looking forward to when I first began writing iphone apps was to see what sort of awesome tools apple would have for me to use to track my sales and trends.

So far I actually couldn’t be more disappointed by what’s on offer. Maybe I’ve just gotten spoiled by things like google analytics, but it’s very weird that everything is in a dry table view with no graphs or pretty charts whatsoever. No sorting or grouping, even! Perhaps I’m supposed to use excel or something. Maybe later on I will.

I’ve also found it a bit annoying that none of the data is in realtime. Currently the only thing I’m actually able to use is the daily sales and trend reports. What I’ve been doing is downloading the report once a day and sticking those reports into a folder.

I’ve also whipped up a quick ruby function to give me fast totals of how many of my apps have been downloaded, by country and by total. I’ve been running this from irb inside my reports directory:

require 'fastercsv'
def sum_report
  reports = Dir[ "*" ].map{ | r | FasterCSV.table( r, :col_sep => "\t" ) }
  reports.inject( {} ) do | hsh, report |
    report.each do | line |
      key = line[ :vendor_identifier ]
      hsh[ key ] ||= { :total_sold => 0, :totals_by_country => {} }
      hsh[ key ][ :total_sold ] += line[ :units ]

      country =  line[ :country_code ] 
      hsh[ key ][ :totals_by_country ][ country ] ||= 0
      hsh[ key ][ :totals_by_country ][ country ] += line[ :units ]
    end
    hsh
  end
end

Since the monetary totals included in the reports factor in currency types, and since handling currency conversion is annoying, I just generate my little report and then I manually multiply the units by my store price. This is easy enough now since I currently only have one paid app in the store, but down the line I’m probably going to need to change how I’m doing this.

I may spend some time at some point in the future getting a more sophisticated system setup, but for now this is sufficient.

I’m hoping the financial reports are better…