✦ Field note
Reading Play Console purchase reports without drowning
Play will give you more columns than a Wednesday afternoon can hold. Teams then either ignore the CSV or build a pivot that hides the SKU.
The order we use on this desk, before any chart:
- Product ID, then order amount, then purchase state. If those three do not reconcile to the catalogue list, stop. You are reading a mix of old sale IDs and current ones.
- Refunds with the original order date, not only the refund date. A refund posted on Friday for a Monday night festival pack is a festival finding.
- Country, then financial status. Malaysia plus a failed financial status in a two-hour window is a bank story.
- Base plan and offer ID, if you sell subscriptions. Introductory offers hide here when the listing still shows the full month.
We print the first pass. It is slower. It is also how a double-charged token shows up as two rows instead of a ‘revenue dip’.
Apple’s reports are narrower and blunter. If you sell on both stores, do not merge them into one sheet on day one. Merge after each store has been allowed to be wrong in its own way. The performance audit is built on that unmerged reading.