Apple Slicer

What?

This script parses App Store Connect financial reports and splits sales by Apple subsidiaries which are legally accountable for them. It may be used to help generating Reverse Charge invoices for accounting and in order to correctly issue EC Sales Lists mandatory in the EU.

Why?

In theory, selling apps is easy

You happily generate revenue with your apps on the App Store and Apple dutifully transfers the proceeds to you.

In reality, though, ...

...you have to remit taxes for your App Store sales of course. For that reason, tax authorities require some sort of receipt for your income from App Store sales. But will they accept the App Store Connect (formerly iTunes Connect) Financial Reports? Or your bank statements?

Most probably they won't. This is why you need to generate receipts by invoicing Apple using the Reverse Charge procedure. Well, in bureaucratic Germany, at least.

But wait! In Europe, there is more to do

For purchases that have been made in any member state of the European Union, Apple – in the role of your sales commissionaire – is accountable for remitting associated taxes. For that reason, your local tax authorities require you to file a periodical EC Sales List (also known as ESL or Recapitulative Statement) of those sales in order for them to be able to counter-check Apple's tax returns.

This is true if your business is based in the EU. In Germany, for example, the required tax document is called Zusammenfassende Meldung.

Now for the problem

While due to Apple's internal cash pooling the wire transfer of your App Store proceeds is issued solely by Apple's European subsidiary in Ireland, namely Apple Distribution International^*), the amount transmitted doesn't necessarily consist of European sales only.

In fact, because Apple Distribution International also collects revenue of other countries (at the time being f. ex. also Chinese and generally "rest of world" sales), it would therefore be wrong to declare the whole sum paid by Apple Distribution International in your ESL.

Instead, in order to correctly declare business done between you and Apple, the sum paid by Apple Distribution International must be split into revenue made in member states of the European Union and into revenue made in Non-EU countries.

^*) It used to be iTunes S.à.r.l. in Luxembourg until February 5th, 2017 when Apple merged it with their Irish subsidiary, Apple Distribution International.

This is where this script comes handy

It breaks up App Store sales by country and assigns them to the specific Apple subsidiary which is legally accountable for them – for example, Apple Canada, Inc. for Canadian or iTunes K.K. for Japanese sales. The information which country is managed by which Apple subsidiary is taken from Schedule 2, Exhibit A of Apple's Paid Applications contract you signed when starting your App Store business.

You can use the output of the script to help genereating Reverse Charge invoices for accounting and also in order to correctly issue your EC Sales Lists.

How?

In App Store Connect go to Payments & Financial Reports and download your financial reports (either as Multiple Files or Single File) of the desired billing month into an appropriately named directory. For example, if you want your sales for September, 2022 to be split, download the financial reports for 2022/09 and move the resulting *0922*.txt into a directory named 0922.

Additionally, in order to display revenue in your local currency, the script needs the currency exchange rates and tax withholding amounts that were applicable at the time of the payment. They aren't included in the financial report files, but luckily App Store Connect has them available for you in an extra file which can be downloaded by clicking on the small blue icon right above the Estimated Earnings column. Place this file in the same directory as the previously downloaded reports. It should be named financial_report.csv.

You are now ready to execute the script with the reports directory as parameter:

./slicer.py ~/Downloads/AppStoreFinancialReports/0922

Example output

The script generates tab-delimited output, more or less ready to be pasted into your favourite billing and/or tax return application.

Sales date: 31.08.2022 - 27.09.2022 

Apple Distribution International
Internet Software & Services
Hollyhill Industrial Estate
Hollyhill, Cork
Republic of Ireland
VAT ID: IE9700053D

Sales in Finland (FI)
	Quantity Product	Amount		Exchange Rate	Amount in EUR
	1	 Example App 5	EUR 12,17	1.00000		12,1700 €

		 Subtotal FI:	EUR 12,17	1.00000		12,17 €

Sales in France (FR)
	Quantity Product	Amount		Exchange Rate	Amount in EUR
	1	 Example App 5	EUR 12,17	1.00000		12,1700 €

		 Subtotal FR:	EUR 12,17	1.00000		12,17 €

Sales in Switzerland (CH)
	Quantity Product	Amount		Exchange Rate	Amount in EUR
	2	 Example App 4	CHF 1,30	0.80030		1,0404 €
	5	 Example App 2	CHF 3,25	0.80030		2,6010 €
	6	 Example App 3	CHF 7,80	0.80030		6,2423 €
	16	 Example App 1	CHF 20,80	0.80030		16,6462 €

		 Subtotal CH:	CHF 33,15	0.80030		26,53 €

Sales in Germany (DE)
	Quantity Product	Amount		Exchange Rate	Amount in EUR
	2	 Example App 6	EUR 24,34	1.00000		24,3400 €
	15	 Example App 5	EUR 158,21	1.00000		158,2100 €

		 Subtotal DE:	EUR 182,55	1.00000		182,55 €

EU Total:	 233,42 €


iTunes K.K.
〒 106-6140
6-10-1 Roppongi, Minato-ku, Tokyo
Japan

Sales in Japan (JP)
	Quantity Product	Amount		Exchange Rate	Amount in EUR
	1	 Example App 4	JPY 47,60	0.00817		0,3889 €
	1	 Example App 3	JPY 94,40	0.00817		0,7712 €

		 Subtotal JP:	JPY 142,00	0.00817		1,16 €

JP Total:	 1,16 €

You can configure your local currency (€ in this example) within the script.

One more thing…

Now, how to actually report sales handled by Apple's EU subsidiary to the tax authorities? With a little help from Steuererklärung.app, it's quite straightforward: Run the script with the -steuerapp-esl parameter and all that's left to do is to select the current reporting period on the ESL form. Your VAT ID and address data will be remembered by the app after your first successful submission.

Obligatory disclaimer

There is absolutely no warranty. I am (thankfully) not a tax advisor and therefore cannot guarantee for the correctness of the above or the Python script in any way. You need to verify for yourself if the above mentioned procedures are compatible with or even needed by your country's legislation. Also, it is your obligation alone to check if the numbers the script computes are reasonable.

Pull Requests

Neither English nor Python are my native language – corrective PRs are very welcome!