Dear Aunt TUAW: Help me track my iTunes spending

Dear Aunt TUAW,

Pardon the OCD question here, but I have not been able to find an adequate answer.

Every time I purchase an item from Apple, I get an email listing the item and the price I paid. I have hundreds of these emails saved. Is there a tool that will parse them and summarize how much I spent on each app?

There are tools that look at what you currently have in your apps folder (which may or may not be all of them) and indicates the current price on the app store (which may or may not be what you paid), but this is not what I am looking for.

I would like to extract a full list of what I paid from the return emails. All Apple will suggest is that you tediously click in iTunes through hundreds of receipts, and even then, there is no way to copy (export) the text from iTunes. All you can do is screen shot one receipt at a time.

How can I get a full list of my purchases?

Help me, Auntie TUAW. You're my only hope!

Your loving nephew,

Sterling

Dear Sterling,

Auntie doesn't have good news for you here. She contacted Apple directly to see if she could request a sales history list in a more common form, like CSV. iTunes already uses this format for vendors, allowing them to review sales. Unfortunately, she got nowhere. With names and emails changed to protect the innocent, here's what iTunes support replied:

This was followed by standard instructions on how to use View My Account in iTunes.

You can find a number of parsing solutions on this Ask MetaFilter discussion thread that may help with your archived emails (although the point of the discussion was on categorizing apps, not purchases in general). Auntie doesn't have your archive (she groups her work purchases by month via her credit card statement) so was unable to test them.

Best of luck! Hugs,

Auntie T.