Need reports for sales totals, expenses, tax collected, etc. for tax purposes

turbopower
Contributor
Contributor

We are trying to collect data for tax return computation for the year.  We need to know our gross amounts, shipping charged, eBay fees paid, PayPal fees paid, sales tax collected and net amounts.  We tried using the history reports downloaded in CSV format and then convert them to Excel files but they are a nightmare.  These reports have every action that occurred, such as showing a row for transaction pending and then one minute later showing another row entry for transaction completed, on the same purchase. The chages are shown twice in the same column and you cannot do a sum on that column because the amounts will be doubled. You ahve to go row by row and clean this stuff up.  I see no purpsoe for these reports, as they are just a data dump.  There are also entries for funds held and then funds released that are a few minutes apart.  Basically, they are dumping everyting into that spreqadsheet and it is a nighmare to clean it up.  I spent 2 days on these things and they are so convoluted I am not confident that the data is clean enough to submit tax returns.

 

What pre-formatted reports are availabe so I can just enter a date range and get this data?  I need totals, not transaction specific data. 

 

A little help please!!!!!!

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4 REPLIES 4

dave11
Contributor
Contributor

Hate to tell you, but I think we are S-O-O-L. I held off the state for a year, since this was my first time doing the sales tax myself. I begged and pleaded and they let me wait until the end of the year, otherwise I would have to go through this insanity 4 times a year. If you are over $200 for the year in sales tax, they insist on quaterly payments. Unbelievable. So I go to start today and realize there is apparently no way to separate the shipping from the actual sales. And since the state insists on starting with your total gross and widdling it down from there, I would have to manually go back through hundreds of sales and separate the shipping from the items to figure this out... All so they can get a lousy $400 of sales tax, which accounts for a tiny fraction of my overall web sales. And this is BEFORE all the tax district nonsense, which is it's whole own CF. This is a nightmare and I have no idea how to fix it without spending days. I can't even just dump it with my tax guy, because even he wouldn't be able to do it without this data.

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fdavidm
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Contributor

There is simply no excuse for PayPal to be providing such poor reports. There is also no excuse for PayPal to only provide the last three months of sales data on-line. PayPal needs needs to provide a year-end report which separates out this data. Given the fees and commissions, PayPal charges this is simply incredible.

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khurasanminis
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Contributor

I love how no paypal admins have even bothered to get into this discussion.  The fact that they do not provide this very simple reporting, when they are the ones processing all the payments, is just beyond belief.

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dave11
Contributor
Contributor

Yeah, I have to say... I've been a fair supporter of PP for a while. Overall I think they do a good job. I've always tried to shout down the ignorant haters that still whine (icorrectly) about having to have an account to buy stuff through PP, and all the other nonsense. But I have to admit... For as big as they are, and as much as they make, they don't seem to try very hard. I've asked three times over years now, why shipping slips for multi item invoices don't list any of the items on the slip. There is basically nothing that automatically outputs the info for what people are paying for from an invoice, on any sort of recipt. I mean seriously... That's a joke. How hard could it be to make this happen? As small as my biz is, I constantly add stuff to make things easier for people. But a company the size of PP can't add the most simple things like this? Then they keep sending you surveys on "how they're doing". Why? lol Nobody is ever going to read those, or do anything you suggest in them... So why do they want us to fill them out at all?

 

So basically, what it comes down to is... You're going to have to use a whole separate app... Transfer every single sale over to that app manually... and then you'll have a way to properly search and do other stuff, that any legit business needs to do. Which is stupid.

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