Calculate Total Money you Have Spent on Google Play Purchases Historically

Understanding your historical Google Play in-app spending is crucial for analyzing your finances. Unfortunately, calculating your total spent over a long period isn't easy. Google doesn't provide a simple way to see a 'Total Spent' summary in their dashboard. I recently wanted to check my spending from 'Jan 2012 to Feb 2024' and found over 900 individual paid entries in my Payment Center.

I was not surprised as I use many useful apps and services for myself and my clients. Irrespective of that, I wanted to calculate the total, but entering them manually would be an incredibly time-consuming task for me. I'm sure Google purposefully made this process less straightforward to discourage users from analyzing their spending patterns. They may lose subscriptions if users can easily analyse their  overspending habits. Ultimately it's a business for Big G. 😃

After researching a bit I found a way to get it done quickly. Though it's having 900+ entries I was able to figure out my TOTAL SPENT till now on my Google Play Store Purchases.

Here is a super easy way to Calculate your Total Money Spent on Google Play in-app purchases:

1. Login to the Google Payment Center from your account.
2. You will see list of payments, keep expanding that list by clicking on the 'view more transaction' button until you reach to your required timeline.
3. Once all transactions are expanded then you have to copy only the transition table as shown in the below image.
4. Once you selected all entries copy them [in my case it was freaking 900+ 🙃] & then paste it in Google spreadsheet or Microsoft Excel. P.S: You have to paste properly so that it will have a proper table structure like the below image.
5. Then you have to focus only on the price column and use the 'Find & replace' function in the spreadsheet to remove "opening ( ,  closing ) and currency ₹ "symbols as well as a few non-numerical data from the Amount column.
6. Once you done with removing all non-numerical data then simply use function '=SUM(consider the entire price column)'  to calculate the total amount you spend. I was shocked after this but now I'm going to be responsible from onwards to limit my subscriptions.
7. You can also use the FITLER option in a spreadsheet to calculate APP-specific expenses as well.

In this way, you can easily figure out your historical total spending at Google Play till now.

Use Google Play Budget Feature to prevent children's spending:

Google also has some useful tools for all accounts. Google Play Budget manager helps control future spending but doesn't calculate past totals. Most of the parents allow their children to use some premium learning apps but many time due to no budget limit your children may overspend on unuseful apps. This may lead to long credit card billing for parents. Google has a solution for this.  Here is how you can opt-in to manage the spending budget for your children:

1. Navigate to Google Play from any device.
2. At the top right, tap your 'Profile picture'.
3. Tap 'Payments & subscriptions' and then 'Budget & order history'.
4. Tap Set budget.
5. Enter an amount
6. Tap Save.

After doing this explain to your child why you're setting a budget and how it will help them track their spending habits. For stronger control, consider using Family Link which provides you with approval tools for all purchase requests. This is better option than setting budget limit.

In this way, you can prevent your future spending by including your monthly budget. It is a good tool but most of the time we realise the use of this when we already spent a lot 🙂

Conclusion:

You can Submit feedback to Google suggesting that they can include a total spending overview within Google Play settings. Your feedback may help them to implement this user-friendly feature in the future. If they wish to :).

It's useful to review your purchase history in any of these ways, you can manually tally up the total amount spent on in-app purchases. Keep in mind that this method is not that time-consuming even if you have a long history of purchases, & I already provided you a direct overview of calculating your total spending on Google Play. Please do share your experience and amount in the comments :). Hope it will not shock you like me.