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.

[spatial_exec]

Amanda,

Can you give us some specifics? What is the plan and what is the schedule? Will you be rolling out in phases or all at once? 

[gpwebmaster]

This should be as easy as 1-2-3 for these folks and yet they refuse to supply what is needed by those of us who got involved with paypal when we started out businesses. Now that our businesses are successful enuff to start paying taxes (sales and income) it is inconceivable that PayPal and the software geniuses have not anticipated this need years ago. If I treated my customers as badly as PayPal does, I would have skinny kids. I guess that PayPal is only going to get off their backsides when someone in India/China sees the need and fulfills it and then they will expect their loyal customers to stay with them and PayPal is stupid if they assume that. "**bleep** hath no fury like a businessman scorned"!

[pitwoman]

This is a disgrace!!!! I'm reading posts from OVER a year ago that said you were working on integrating Paypal with Quickbooks and so far, NOTHING! 

I set my business up on Quickbooks in April, and Paypal is not even listed as a financial institution able to download to Quickbooks. EVERY other financial institution in the country that I know of has accomplished what Intuit says is a simple task for Paypal to do, yet it's still not done??

EVERY month I have to MANUALLY type in each Paypal transaction. 

If this isn't done soon, I'll simply have to quit using Paypal for my business and find another UP TO DATE provider.

I know I'm not alone here.  So what's your problem????

[debb8904]

has anyone tried the third party option here:http://www.bigredconsulting.com/aboutebaylink.htm 

its not about ebay its about getting excel files to input into quickbooks

debbie

[judyschmitz]

alas, only pc based - im on mac, This is so ridiculous. And unprofessional that there is no integration.

[pgdp]

Hi, we've been using the Big Red Consulting "PayPal to QuickBooks Link" product for many months now. While it's possible to reliably import PayPal data into QuickBooks with the product, we found that there was considerable trial-and-error work needed with the setup.

The product essentially imports PayPal transactions into Excel, gives you a chance to review and edit the data, and then allows you to import into QuickBooks.

On the positive side, once we worked out a few kinks the product does a good job handling shopping cart details such as Product Numbers, Descriptions, etc., and so integrates well with our QuickBooks Manufacturing & Wholesale version. We get good records of which customer ordered what product, when.

However, there's a great deal of "find and replace" editing needed before you can safely import the spreadsheet contents. For example, the product attempts to create a new phantom "customers" (named UPS*...) for each UPS shipment sent, and you've got to carefully edit these out by hand.

Each import process takes us about an hour for the 150 or so transactions we handle each month, making it difficult to import frequently enough for the data to be useful for real-time inventory planning, etc. This forces us to keep separate parts and builds records, apart from QuickBooks, just so that we can order inventory on time.

The Big Red Consulting product does offer honest, no-nonsense pricing - none of their competitors' horrific subscription pricing that costs the equivalent of your QuickBooks license fee, per year,  for this simple capability. And BRC personnel have provided surprisingly good email support for such an economically priced product.

So yes, the Big Red Consulting can be a workable solution until PayPal solves this (enormous) customer pain.

Note to the PayPal folks: our import and reconciliation hassles loom so large that it’s had us looking for other payment gateways that can provide a better solution. I believe that addressing this issue ought to be a priority for retaining PayPal customers. There's a lot we like about PayPal - but not its lack of support for QuickBooks!

-  Paul D

[pgdp]

Update Re: PayPal to QuickBooks Integration

Since my recent comments about the few shortcomings with Big Red Consulting's "PayPal to QuickBooks Link" product we contacted their support team, who advised that detailed mapping options are now available with the current version (6.44 and above). The feature can be accessed during import on the "Accounts to Use" tab, when you click the "Settings" button.

We tested this and found it to work well. This cuts the time needed for each import down to a few minutes - no more need to manually search and replace names and accounts for shipping and other transactions handled by PayPal.

So yes, we recommend the Big Red Consulting product.

It's also a great value at $79 (paid-up) per user, including good email tech support and product updates.

Tip of the hat to Ruth Perryman, a very smart and helpful QB specialist who turned us on to the product.

[gpwebmaster]

Thanks for the update. What still needs to be fixed with this software as I do not have the time to learn?

[pgdp]

Hi, from our perspective there isn't much currently lacking with the Big Red Consulting (BRC) "PayPal to QuickBooks Link" product. We'd love to have a solution that links in real-time with zero intervention, but realistically I think the BRC software comes reasonably close at a very affordable cost.

Of course, you'll want to carefully compare your first few BRC imports in QuickBooks with your PayPal ledger to confirm that all the right data is there. We've found that the BRC product gives us accurate, detailed sales receipts for each online order. If you ever move to the Manufacturing and Wholesale version of QuickBooks this can be a huge help in keeping up-to-date inventory records. And, it feels great to import the data with BRC and immediately access QuickBooks reports to see monthly product sales trends and other useful views.

The BRC imports are also a lifesaver for calculating local sales tax owed to our state comptroller. The first few times we checked the QuickBooks sales taxes payable ledger (produced by data from the BRC imports) against our manual records to confirm that the numbers were right. Now we're confident enough to work directly from the data that's been imported into QuickBooks. This makes remitting the correct amount of state sales taxes really easy for us.

We did find that those many "temporary hold" entries found in the PayPal ledger, created not just by UPS "estimated shipping fees" but also by any charge backs, etc., don't seem to show up in the imports until actually charged. This removes a lot of clutter from your QuickBooks ledger, but will likely result in QuickBooks showing a different PayPal balance than your PayPal overview screen. 

I also recall that withdrawals to other bank accounts don't necessarily show up in the PayPal to QuickBooks Link imports (depending on how you configure the imports) which can be a good thing if you're already getting these transfer records from your local bank history downloads.

I think the key is to carefully verify and document the steps you took in clicking through the PayPal download options (also outlined in the Big Red Consulting documentation), along with the initial configurations you used in the Big Red Consulting product just so that each download is repeated the same way. 

Are there any other users of the BRC product out there? If so, please offer up your comments...

[HaveAnEpiphany]

Would definitely appreciate a better solution. Currently, reconciling even the data I download from PayPal is ridiculously time-consuming and woefully inaccurate.