I’ve been calculating my iTunes spending manually, but someone pointed me towards SpentOnApps today – it’s a tool that combs your email folders for iTunes receipts and adds it all up for you. It’s a good idea, but not perfect – for starters, the total was off:

By my excessively anal retentive calculations, I had spent $1564.12 by 31/12/2010. If this app is truly calculating all iTunes receipts in my mailbox, the total should actually be HIGHER than my last count because it would include money spent in January. There’s always a chance that my own calculations are off – unlikely because I’m practically perfect, but there’s still a chance – but the fact I can’t rationalize the discrepancy gets my panties in a knot and makes me question the data.

Still, something like this could be really useful if:

• It pulled information directly from your iTunes account instead of your email address – not everyone files their iTunes receipts religiously like I do
• It allowed you to add multiple iTunes accounts
• You could break data up into chunks of time – day, month, quarter, year
• It smelled like cookies and involved a unicorn somehow

If you’re at all interested in your spending habits, it’s a neat tool. That being said, there’s so much irony in spending $2 on an app to track my iTunes spending I feel like I’m in a parallel universe or something.

It’s fun to do be anal!