Obtain statements / transaction detail as debit and credit (dr and cr)?

timfry
Contributor
Contributor

Hi community,

 

I'm an accountant and have recently started helping people with their PayPal account reconciliations. I need your help!

 

From an accounting standpoint, PayPal transactions are complicated by nature; they basically involve nothing but transfers from various accounts and various types of accounts. From where I stand, this is only made more complicated by the use of ambiguous terminology "payment", "deposit", "withdrawal", etc., and the nonstandard classification of transaction type "Gross", "Fee", "Net".

 

I realize this is all translatable to standard accounting terms, but this only further complicates everything. The way a PayPal account would be approached from an accounting standpoint would be as an asset account (a cash account) from which amounts would be debited and credited. To approach it this way greatly simplifies the accounting: to increase the balance the account is debited, to decrease it's credited. Easy peasy!

 

Is there a way generate a statement or report that simply shows whether the PayPal account in question has been debited or credited? The only other information I need is the date and the offsetting account (where the money did go). The detail of whether this is a transfer, withdrawal, deposit, moon landing, volcanic ocean vent, etc. could all be in a description field somewhere: it's largely irrelevant. 

 

Any help is appreciated!

 

My other thought would be to leverage the API to transpose the ambiguous terms into standard accounting terminology. I looked but cannot find anything like this. Does anyone know if anything like this exists? Maybe I'll build this if no one has...

 

Thank you so much!

Tim

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