Is there a payout Transaction ID that links to the transactions that are feeding it?

[jxwalter]

I know this is a perennial question,  but I'm hoping for new information anyway...

I'm working on automating my reconciliation from PayPal transactions to actual payouts that are sent out.  For years i have done this manually, creating the merchant fees and capital payments in my accounting system, then trying to match payouts/fees/payments with the actual invoices that were recorded.   Always a real trick, especially since there are so many ways that a payout can be affected (sales, fees, Credit card withdrawal fees, payments, refunds, purchases from PayPal balance, and currency conversions, holds/releases) to name most of them.  

My coding has figured out how to parse 90+ percent of the transactions but theres always curve balls that the data throws at my process.  Such as a sale in Euros, with both fees and currency conversions, being combined with a refund in USD - there is no way i can easily separate the resulting payout.

A simple link from what transactions are included in what payout is all that is needed, and in my mind must be somewhere in the data, but neither the standard User Interface download from paypal, nor a specific API call from my ReportPundit third party software  has it.  

Again, my coding is able to find the linkage for many of these, but the curve balls are messy and interfere with the easy reconciliation.  I'm growing rapidly, and while manually reconciling was ok when i had 50 sales a month, its now 300 sales a month.  When a single payout can have more than 50 transactions within one of them, making the numbers all match in my accounting is a nightmare to do manually.  

Does anyone know how to find that linkage if it exists?

Below are some of the different transactions I'm finding and trying to code into my automation

type: T0006  Express Payment (a sale, but not the only way sales show up - a T0000 General Payment can be a sale too).  these i need to reconcile with my actual invoices for the same

type: T1107  Payment Refund (which can pull directly from the bank, or from the current balance in the account, which really confuses my system)

type: T0300  Bank Deposit (to directly pull from bank account to pay for a refund)

type: T0003  Pre approved payment for services that can end up pulling directly or from my PayPal balance

type: T0700  General Card Deposit (for an external payment for services)

type: T0000 General Payment (for PayPal Capital that gets pulled out of payout, but also could be general purchases )

type: T0400  General Withdrawal (actual payout that has transaction fees removed, again, not attached to individual sales)

type: T0600  General Card Withdrawal (using the instant transfer to bank feature, but now with additional cc fees deducted)

type; T0200  General Currency Conversion (for overseas payments, modifying the original currency to US Dollars, again, not clear which ones)

type: T0201  User Initiated currency Conversion (not sure the difference, esp cause it was tied to a USD transaction)

and so forth.  How each of these shows up in the transaction file is really difficult to isolate and total up to reconcile activity with payouts.    

and yes, referring to the payment Hold/Release (T2101 and T2102) mess, theres definitely no way to easily figure out when and where those get applied and show up in my bank (all of the transaction fees are not part of these hold/release line items, but somehow need to be linked to the original source data).

All we need is a direct transaction ID link for what transactions are included in what payout.  You still need to code it for automation, but even manually, it would simplify how to reconcile, and for all the weird permutations that can occur in your PayPal transactions, it would take the guesswork out of reconciling.  As far as I know, this information is not available in the user interface transaction download, nor is it in an API download that ReportPundit, a third party service, offers.  

any idea on how to find that link ID (assuming it exists?)