/ting-analytics

Splits Ting Mobile bill totals according to line usage.

Primary LanguagePython

Ting Mobile bill analyzer

My family shares a pay-as-you-go Ting Mobile cell service account. This means one person ends up footing the bill for everyone. Unfortunately, there is not an easy way to view per-line usage data once a billing cycle has closed, so splitting up a bill based on usage isn't easily possible.

To make splitting the bill according to usage possible, I created this project. It required some reverse-engineering of the ting.com website combined with a PDF parser. It essentially works like so:

  1. Given the account username and password (supplied as arguments), establish a session with the ting.com web server.
  2. Download the billing history from the internal Ting API endpoint to get a list of bill IDs.
  3. For each bill, get the detailed usage of data, minutes, and texts. This data was available as a CSV and looked like so: 
     Date,Device,ICCID,Nickname,Location,Kilobytes,Surcharges ($),Type
 "December 18, 2017",##########,'###################,,United States of America,20614,0.0,GSM
 "December 18, 2017",##########,'###################,,United States of America,920,0.0,GSM
 "December 19, 2017",##########,'###################,,United States of America,6263,0.0,GSM
    Then sum the usage for each phone line.
  4. For each bill, download the PDF invoice. Parse that invoice (using tabula-py) for the total data, calling, and texting usage fees.
  5. Split the fees according to line usage.
  6. Save the output as a .xlxs file.

The code really isn't the most beautiful, but it works. It could break if Ting changes their invoice PDF formatting, as a Tabula template is needed to parse the PDF. Simply creating a new template and adding it to the tabula-templates folder would resolve the problem.

Running the code

If you too have a Ting Mobile account, you should be able to use this code to split up your usage by line.

Steps

  1. Ensure Java is installed. (Tabula uses Java, so you'll need it.)
  2. Install the Python requirements by running pip install -r requirements.txt
  3. Run python get_and_process_bills.py <data_dir> <username> <password>, replacing <data_dir> with the path to the directory where cached PDFs and CSVs should be saved and replacing <username> and <password> with your Ting account username and password, respectively.
  4. Open Ting usage.xlsx (saved to <data_dir>).