We created FileMagnet together with our good friends at Magnetism Studios. When the App Store checks started to arrive, the confusing task of dividing up the proceeds went to Dave Keay. Sure, we could have just split the profits evenly and called it a day, but Dave endeavored to understand the ultra-confusing sales report.
If you haven’t seen an App Store sales report, then let me explain why it’s so confusing. Sales reports are divided up by currency zone. This is necessary for several reasons. Firstly, App Store products are priced differently in different currencies. For example, if you choose to price your app at $4.99 in the US, then it’s going to be priced €3.99 in the Eurozone. This isn’t an exact conversion based on exchange rate, but instead it’s rounded to the nearest “pretty price”. The second confusing thing is that while the foreign currencies amounts are reported, the actual payment to Magnetism is made in dollars, converted using whatever exchange rate the bank in question decided to use at the time the payment was made.
Dave built an elaborate Excel spreadsheet to run all of the numbers himself. When the dust settled, what he found was curious. Everything added up nicely except for the Yen column. After a few months of sales reports, he noticed that we were consistently missing 20% of our money from Japan!
It’s absolutely certain that if Dave hadn’t done all the legwork to manually verify the sales numbers, this 20% would have gone completely unnoticed. When you combine pricing differences and changing exchange rates, who’s going to miss a percentage of a percentage of a percentage?
I can haz more Yen?
Dave wrote to Apple to find out what the deal. This is what they told us:
“There is a 20% withholding tax in Japan until the Japanese tax authorities have accepted your tax exemption forms. This can take 90 days or longer. … They were required at the contract setup time in iTunes Connect. If you haven’t completed these and sent them in, you must or you should not have been paid.”
Japanese tax exemption forms? This is the first we’ve heard of those. I think Dave would have remembered filling out 12 pages of tax forms in Japanese! Clearly they weren’t required at the time we set up our account. We eventually found some fine print at the bottom of the tax forms webpage explaining the need for the forms.
“For developers residing outside of Japan who wish to sell applications in Japan, for Japanese tax treaty information, click here”.
Nothing is certain with Yen and Taxes
Our forms have long since been submitted. It says it takes about 90 days, so I’m not sure that we’re going to get the full amount yet. We should get the December payment in a few days, so we will see if we still get only 80% or the full 100%. I’m curious to see when we get the extra 20% amounts from the previous months.
Onaji Kama no Meshi o Kutta
We thought we’d blog about this because I’m sure there are other devs out there in the same situation. If you don’t remember filling out 12 pages of Japanese tax forms, you might want to go do so immediately.
Happy Tax Season from all of us at Ecamm and Magnetism!
The whole Ecamm team has been transported to San Francisco for Macworld Expo 2009! Drop by booth 231 in the South Hall and say hi. We’ll be demoing the new 
