I received my first payment from Apple today, and was suprised to see there was a 500+ unit (not in my favor) difference between what they said we sold on the daily/weekly reports and what was on the financial report. Before I go to them with it, I wanted to see if other developers have had this kind of delta between the reports and statements… btw they only itemized one returned unit, so I’m guessing its not that. I know they say not to trust these trend reports for financial earnings, but if this is common… the reports are effectively useless to us.
Were those 500 units in one region are were they scattered among other regions? Isn’t there some unit threshold that a region needs to exceed before it gets payed out?
This is normal. One thing to note is that the financial reports are based off of Apple’s financial calendar, so “march” may only be, say, the period from the 1st of march through the 27th or something. A calendar with the exact cutoffs for each “month” by apple’s financial definition is available on itunes connect.
There is also another factor, which is that Apple will only pay you for the money that actually got into their coffers by the end of that date, and it takes a couple days for funds to move from bank to bank (just like how a credit card or wire transfer may not post to an account for a day or two). For example, if a user buys your app on the 27th of march as in the above example, you’ll see that sale represented on your daily sales report for the 27th, however it will probably not make it into your march payment, even though the sale happened within the month. Instead, that money will probably take a day or two to get to Apple, so those sales will instead appear on the following month.
In short - your 500 sales were probably from the tail end of the month, and will appear on your next month’s report. This is the explanation I got from an Apple rep, and so far it has proven to be accurate for me.
