Treeki / iBlame

figure out how much money your iCloud Family members owe you

This slapdash pair of Python 3 scripts deals with a problem I ran into with iCloud Family Sharing.

All purchases made by users who are part of an iCloud Family go through the payment method associated with the family owner - the only way to bypass this is for individual users to top up their own account with iTunes credit, externally. This means that every time one of my friends buys an app or subscribes to Grindr Xtra, it comes off my credit card.

Thankfully, Apple sends me an email every time a transaction happens, and it's fairly easy to parse these.

I set up a Fastmail filter which moves emails from [e-mail] with the subject Your invoice from Apple. into a specific folder.

The imap-download.py script in this repository connects to Fastmail and fetches all the emails in this folder, storing them into individual files in the emails/ directory.

Then, email-parser.py scans every email in the directory and extracts the information, building a simple table of:

• transaction dates
• the amount that came from the user's iTunes store credit
• the amount that came off my credit card
• the name associated with the Apple ID
• the items contained within that transaction

2018-07-19 |  699 |    0 | ninji | iCloud: 2 TB Storage Plan
2018-07-22 | 1399 |    0 | ninji | Affinity Designer
2018-09-02 |    0 |  499 | ninji | Donut County
2018-09-02 |  309 |  390 | ninji | iCloud: 2 TB Storage Plan

It also builds a running total of how much each Apple ID has charged to my card, and displays this at the end.

This could probably do more intelligent things (like maybe automatically notifying the user in question), but I'm happy with this for now as it still gives me a way to figure out how much people owe me without manually going through tons of invoice emails.

config.json

This file defines stuff that's used by both of the Python scripts, both to download the emails using IMAP and to parse them.

The imap_ keys are fairly self-explanatory.

billed_to_combo is the "BILLED TO" text in the invoice used for payments that use a mix of store credit and a regular card transaction (e.g. when your iTunes balance isn't enough to cover the whole payment).

billed_to_prefix is the text that the "BILLED TO" entry starts with for card payments - it uses a prefix because it ends with the last 4 digits of the card number.

total_keywords is the text that identifies the line containing the card transaction's total, for mixed payments.

currency is the prefix for prices, which gets stripped.