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.

[astallings]

I have a feeling there will be a big demand for better QB integrations in 2011 when PP is required to start filing 10-99's

[JoeDwyer]

I work for a company that specializes in integrating QuickBooks with outside data. We've been hot an heavy all summer on creating a PayPal to QuickBooks integration system that is one click and seamless. We've just announced it and would love to get you up and running with it.

Check out our the basic details below and contact us if interested. We'd be glad to get you up and running.

Autofy for PayPal Demo Video

[cupnw]

I agree with Mainbrain on this issue "When you download your Paypal transactions to QB, you only have ONE choice for an income category and ONE choice for an expense category!" This is a significant time sink - we have to update each transaction to get the category and category splits correct in QB. We have to do this weekly otherwise we will fall too far behind in our accounting.

But to set the record straight for some of the other postings, Paypal does provide a primitive download to QB. Goto DOWNLOAD HISTORY in PP and select .IIF filetype to download. Save the file on disk. Then goto QB and click FILE -> UTILITIES -> IMPORT -> IIF FILES. It should import into your Paypal account in QB. Then as Mainbrain mentions, you need to update each transaction to get the category and category splits correct.

[gpwebmaster]

I cannot wait until someone does what PayPal refuses to do so I can drop PayPal like a bad habit.

[gogowanda]

it's funny how all the "paypal employees" now dodge the question, hey where is that lady who first responded an answer has nothing to do w/ mainbrain's question. 

ANY OF YOUR PAYPAL FOLKS STILL HERE? HELLO?

i wish amazon can keep growing and push ebay and paypal out of their comfort zone.  

[pgdp]

I've started to believe that PayPal can't provide a detailed QuickBooks integration feature because it would cause huge confusion (and floods of support questions) given the complicated way that PayPal calculates your current account balance.

For example, each time we ship by our default UPS, the balance in our PayPal "All activity (with balance)" screen typically changes 3 times. We get a Pending transaction for the estimated UPS fee, then a Removed and a Completed transaction several days later as PayPal reverses the Pending fee and posts the actual fee charged by UPS. It appears that any charge backs also produce Temporary Hold and Completed transactions posted many days apart. However, when we ship by US Postal Service the transaction immediately shows up as "Completed" and there's only one entry.

Thank goodness our import tool ("PayPal to QuickBooks Link" by Big Red Consulting) processes only the final, Completed transaction amounts. Otherwise our PayPal ledger in QuickBooks would be a huge mess.

But, this also means that our PayPal ledger in QuickBooks never shows the same balance as our "live" Overview screen in PayPal.

In the event PayPal produces a useful QuickBooks download feature, I think they'd be flooded with support calls asking why the balances don't match.

I doubt that PayPal would redesign their complicated system of recording Pending, Removed and Completed transactions just to provide a PayPal import feature that users can understand.

Having said all that, we found that PayPal's competitors each seem to have far bigger and more frustrating faults than this.

For example, it appears that the total lack of communication between Google Checkout and UPS / USPS would make order processing impossibly cumbersome for sellers of tangible goods like us who don't use a third-party shopping cart.

Ideas, anyone?

[cupnw]

>> For example, each time we ship by our default UPS, the balance in our PayPal "All activity (with balance)" screen typically changes 3 times.

This happens for me, but infrequently (maybe 5% of the time) and for larger amounts. This usually only happens when Paypal determines that there is risk in the transaction and puts a hold on  it. It is independent of UPS and USPS. You may want to investigate if there is some issue in the way you have setup your UPS account.

Yes - it  is a pain and I delete  out 2 of the three transactions in QB since I don't want extra information to deal with.

[pgdp]

I think that our company might be seeing three PayPal history line items (Pending, Removed and Completed) for each UPS shipment because our UPS account is linked to our PayPal account through the Shipping Preferences screen in our PayPal Profile.

Once you start shipping more than a few UPS packages per day, you should call UPS and set a meeting with a local account rep. Often they'll give extra discounts beyond the already good UPS discounts that PayPal gives all its merchants. To get these extra discounts I believe that you need to be shipping more than a couple of UPS packages per day.

Soon after we met with our UPS account rep we noticed that our Completed UPS charges always seem lower than the initial estimated charges that PayPal makes Pending when we first ship the product. We see this on all UPS shipments, and in the case of Next Day and 2nd Day packages the costs reductions can be a few dollars per shipment. This really adds up.

So I suppose that our gripe really stems from the fact that PayPal is trying not to rip us off, letting us take advantage of additional savings offered by UPS.  We get lower shipping costs, but it's very difficult to reconcile our PayPal ledger in QuickBooks with our online PayPal data as a result.

These extra UPS discounts – and the discovery that we could significantly lower our PayPal transaction fees at zero cost by completing the PayPal Merchant Account application – provided our company with two significant sources of repeat cost savings.

Again, any ideas and suggestions are welcome.

[goccogrrl]

This is a hellish issue for small businesses.

We tried to work through Paypal alone but there were multiple errors in translation. The Simpleport process cleared them completely.

SimplePort was a GREAT relief. Their staff is available, friendly and knowledgeable. They are very helpful. They will work with you via email & phone to create a custom profile setup for your company, and in fact will do it for you if you prefer.

There is a monthly fee but it's more a pay to play setup. Since we download quarterly, not weekly or monthly,  we sign in and out of the service and pay $20 quarterly. Not a big hit for such big help.

IMAO, Paypal should absorb SimplePort; the groundwork is done and the support protocols must be reasonably simple after all those years of troubleshooting!

Cheers,

Judyfunk

[Justbradfordbiz]

Amen! Ridiculous that we can't get online access via Quickbooks...shouldn't even have to download an .iif file!