When will Paypal fully integrate with QuickBooks?

[mainbrain]

There must be lots of individual sellers like myself who sell full time on ebay and use QuickBooks for accounting. I have used QB for years and have inquired at Paypal when we will be able to integrate Paypal and QB. You can integrate now, but only in a very primitive and time-consuming way.

When you download your Paypal transactions to QB, you only have ONE choice for an income category and ONE choice for an expense category! I'm not sure what the technical challenge is for Paypal, or if it has just been a very low priority, but the current functionality is pretty close to zero. One still has to go to QB and change all the expense categories one-by-one.

There is supposed to be a third party way to do this, but I have never had the confidence to try it. Seems like Paypal could offer this service easily enough.

[PaoloPP]

I guess Quickbooks is doing it on their own with the "Intuit Payment Network."

https://paymentnetwork.intuit.com/

[goccogrrl]

This is not a fix for Paypal users. It's an alternative, which will require your buyers to sign up.

It's not less expensive but the convenience of the QB integration is very tempting.

Maybe it will push Paypal  in the right direction to keep its business customers.

[jaredfleury]

Yes, it's an alternative but customers don't have to sign up. In the same way that paypal doesn't require a paypal account, neither does intuit. It also allows you to put a button on the invoice so they can pay right from your email. It's a flat fee of 50 cents per transaction and it works seamlessly so far for us.

[sakthi]

Hi you mentioned about a third party transfer like smartport. can you give details. thanks.

[Stonehenge]

While most of us think that Paypal is not responding to this topic, I have a theory about what is happening.   Indeed, the integration between Paypal and the most popular accounting software Quickbooks should be robust and well supported.   But it's bad business for eBay, and that's why it ain't happening.   Cloud accounting is the next big thing, and it will probably supplant Quickbooks for most small businesses.   Paypal has bet on certain horses in the field which includes outright.com and Wave Accouting, and is more likely to integrate with them than all the others.   Just an opinion.

[chrisilk]

Hi,

I am currently working with a customer on an intermediate solution.  We are using Microsoft Excel and VBA to create a Quickbooks posting machine. The spreadsheet includes a form with buttons to initiate loading of Paypal or Authorize.net transaction files (currently, paypal is in excel format while Authorize.net is in QB iif format).  We have also established three reference sheets that are used to translate the transactions to post correctly in Quickbooks.  Currently, as the transactions are loaded into the spreadsheet they are split up into three category sheets.  On the form there is a button for posting the categories one at a time.  The best part is that this programming talks directly to Quickbooks from the spreadsheet.  When you click the button to begin posting you can go to quickbooks and watch the bank balance change as transactions are posted.

[goccogrrl]

www.simpleport dot net  was created for this precise use.

I have used their service for the past three years.

They are VERY helpful in setting up your chart of accounts etc. so the information is properly set up for QB import. I can't recommend them highly enough!!

There is a monthly fee but I only download quarterly and they don't mind that I sign in and out for the fee-based service.

Cheers!
Judy

[cupnw]

I have started using Outright (Outright.com) accounting software (in parallel with Quickbooks). It pulls data automatically from eBay, Paypal and my Wells Fargo bank accounts. It does most of the accounting category classification automatically. I just love it!! It is free until EOY so it is certainly worth a try. It will cost ~ $10/month starting Jan 2012. I plan to stop Quickbooks after 2011 and cutover completely to Outright in 2012. They are also working actively to get the Amazon interface running in a few days and Google wallet is planned in their roadmap.

The founders are from Intuit so they know Quickbooks well and recognize that QB is an overkill for small business eCommerce sellers.

One caveat - it does income statement/Profit & Loss only today. So if you need balance sheet, inventory accounting or accruals, it may be too simple for your needs. They may have this in their future roadmap.

[Pearl24]

I appreciate this. I was totally wondering the same thing about using Outright rather than Quickbooks. I wish it was a one-time fee rather than $10/mo. for long-term costs, but this was very helpful. Has it been reliable in terms of storing customers from Paypal and is it properly managing your taxes? Thank you

[cupnw]

Has it been reliable in terms of storing customers from Paypal

YES

Is it properly managing your taxes?

IT APPREARS TO HAVE ALL THE INFORMATION

I am still running QB and Outright in parallel. I plan to drop QB by end of Jan.

There is one minor difference between QB (Paypal download with .iif file) and Outright. QB books the total of product revenue and shipping revenue. Outright separates eBay sales into product revenue and shipping revenue. It threw me off in the beginning in my reconciliation but now I like having the split.

Returns are handled much better in Outright. I never figured out what QB did with returns. With returns running ~ 5% of revenue, having this detail really me helps me manage returns better.

There are some minor inconveniences in Outright - like not capturing check numbers from the bank. Have filed an enhancement request and hopefully these kind of issues will get addressed over time.

The Amazon interface has started working and this makes my work lot easier. Had to manually data enter this info before.