Apple's Fiscal Calendar 2023, 2024

If you have been looking at the app revenue numbers on the Revenue Cat or other app Portal dashboards you may have seen that the numbers do not match up with what you actually get paid in your bank. The main reason for this discrepancy is Apple's Fiscal calendar. See below for how this works.

For the purpose of easing financial reporting Apple uses a fiscal year calendar. To be more specific, the calendar has 4 quarters, each uses the 5-4-4 week method of managing accounting periods. This type of calendar groups the quarters of the fiscal year into one 5-week “month” and two 4-week “months”. It does seem a bit weird to use this kind of calendar, but it has a major advantage when it comes to starting and ending the month period: the end date of the period is always the same day of the week, which is useful for reviewing the company’s financial performance and planning future expenses.

Above is Apple's fiscal calendar for 2023, 2024. This is the calendar that Apple pays us.

This is the main reason why you're revenue in Revenue Cat will not match what you get in the payout. For example, the money you ‘earn’ in September this year will actually be the revenue from September 8th to October 5th, but the spending will be based on the calendar month (September 1st – 31st).