Reconcile / Reconcilliation Impossible with PayPal

[LDELAOC]

PayPal provides no reasonable means to reconcile transactions to your own account register. And they present inaccurate transaction records.

The design of the information provided by the transaction activity (both the old and new interface) is appalling. The wrongness of it is so readily apparent, it's amazing that it even exists in the format they present.

Here's an example. Each transaction appears to result in an increase to my account of at least $20. Two of them show increases of over $70 after the presented PayPal fees. But, while the account balance shown at the bottom (the oldest transaction) is $2,426.41, after all four transactions, the final balance is $2,416.68. This means, even though I had four deposits ranging from around $20 to $70, my total balance has gone DOWN not up. How is this possible?

I know the answer. A hold has been placed on the transactions by PayPal. It goes into some reserve account for 30 days. I may not like that, but fine. That's their policy. But, why doesn't PayPal show me that? I must click on each individual transaction to see what is going on.

And, why not let me see the Reserve account. If my money is essentially in another account in my name albeit one in which the funds are not available, you should still let me review the transactions on that account.

But, back to the reconciliation issue.

If I download a QIF file, these reserve transactions do show up. So, you may say just use the QIF file to reconcile. Except we now get into the weird timing of transactions in PayPal.

Here's two transactions. A refund and then fee reversal. Initially, $180.00 is refunded reduced by the PayPal fee $3.96 for a net refund of $176.04. It says it right there. Then, above that, I am credited back the $3.96 fee. But, if you look at the balance on each line, it doesn't change. It stays at $5,320.88. So, the refund to me of the $3.96 has no impact on my balance even though PayPal says right there it's a net gain.

With this kind of reporting, how is someone supposed reconcile their account? It would be nice if the new interface addressed this problem (it's been around for years), but it doesn't. I may have download the QIF file, but that does not include account balances, so if I refer to my balances online while using a QIF file, the two will not line up.

And, fundamentally, how can such clearly inaccurate totals be acceptable when presenting a list of transactions online with incorrect balances and missing transactions?

So, I ask you PayPal, what is your design to enable us to reconcile our accounts?

[LDELAOC]

I'm disappointed not to see a reply to this post from PayPal. Now having to reconcile funds moved to "reserve" and then back to my primary PayPal account, I am even more frustrated by this. PayPal does not show the reserve movements online. It is only if you download a transaction history that you see them. Online, you simply see your account balance change dramatically with no connection to presented transactions. As I said initially, PayPal seems to go out of its way to may reconciliation impossible.

[jojochet]

I am in total agreement. After a very long time, I had finally figured out which transactions to filter out from a csv export in order to reconcile my account. It was messy and super annoying, but at least I could do it. When I saw they were offering a new version, I was excited. Alas, the new version is worse than the old!!

1. Many transaction lines are blank in the Name column, so I have to look at my online account to find and identify them.

2. Some of the Type and Status entries are different and it's extremely difficult to parse them out to understand which of the multiple entries for a particular transaction should be reconciled.  

It really shouldn't be this hard. I am able to download csv files from all of my other banking accounts and reconcile them quickly. C'mon, Paypal.

[Whac-A-Mole]

we are volunteers, not your accountant,we have no interest in digging into your account to do the job for you.

you should do this per month ,reconciling your own sales ledger with Paypal account,not wait till a year is over.