reconcile paypal bank account

[knockonwood]

Hi - we are a small company selling on Ebay and have about 5 to 10 transactions per day

I need to be able to reconcile the activity on my Paypal account with what is says in my normal book-keeping ( I use Sage)

The monthly statement on Paypal has daily gross totals (which can be opened up to seperate daily pages) and the activity log will only display 20 transactions at a time. I'd like to get them all to download as a PDF - ie all my activity with balance

Is that possible ? 

Why does Paypal not send me a monthly/weekly statement like any other bank would do - or let me download one ?

Any help appreciated. I need to reconcile from April to November 2014 for my accountant. The job is huge

cheers

Ianto

[PayPal_Dustin]

Hi knockonwood,

Welcome to the PayPal Community Forum. 🙂

That's a good question. We have something call the Reporting Center that can provide all this information. Here's how to view a report in your Reporting Center:

1. Log in to your PayPal account.
2. Click More at the top of the page and select "Reports" from the drop-down menu.
3. Select the report you want to see.

- Dustin

If this post or any other was helpful, please enrich the community by giving kudos or accepting it as a solution.

[knockonwood]

Dustin 

Thank you for writing however you have misunderstood, or not properly read, my question - None of the reports in the reports section do what I asked for and give a download with an account balance that can be reconciled against other bookkeeping.

However the good news is that the new version of Paypal has a Balance History section  (under the Transactions section) with an adjustable date range which when downloaded, gives a normal looking bank statement with the account balance included. The downside is that the charges are taken off the balance 'live' which is very hard for a book-keeper using with normal invoicing to deal with.

My solution has been to adjust the balance on a monthly basis using the summary of charges from the Monthly Financial summary report (found in the reports section you refer to)

The bad news is that the Balance History section has not been working 100%.  Paypal told me on the phone (early Nov 2014) that there were some issues with Java script. I understand these have been addressed so it should work better in future, but how do we know when it will be 100% trustworthy ? 

Regards

Ianto Thornber

Knock on Wood Ltd

Harrogate

UK 

[LauraNoz]

This is what I am having difficulty understanding.

If I sell and item thats £100.00, thats what goes through my till, however Paypal takes the charges off so it will only show at £96.80 less your 3.4% charges + 20p so how do business's balance the books at the end of the day?

[emcrory]

You can request that your monthly statement be sent to you as a PDF.  I believe this is chosen in your account preferences, but not sure.  If you want to see your statements, just log into your account and go the the "Activity" tab.  You will see a dropdown menu on the upper right side of the screen that says "Statements".  You can click on PDF, Activity Export, etc...  My frustration with the statments is that the ending balance on the statment rarely matches my ending balance.  Supposedly this has do do with "pending transactions or disputed transactions" but even taking these into account I can't always get the account to reconcile.  I don't understand this, as it is simple addition and subtraction but no one at customer service has been able to give me a straight answer!

[knockonwood]

I don't see that drop down menu at all

What I'm now doing is this

1) Every 10 days I request a download (from the activity page) of  comma delimited blance affecting payments

2) Wait for them to tell me it's available then download it and open it in a spreadhseet program (excel etc)

3) Get rid of all the junk columns (time of day, email addresses etc) just leaving the dates, names, type, and amounts (which includes the sale amount, transaction fee, and balance)

4) Print this off from the spreadsheet (having divided it into useful sheets using the page break function)

5) Reconcile transactions in my book-keeping

6) Allow for the balance to be incorrect due to the paypal fees throughout the month, but then . . 

7) Get a monthly report after each month end which shows the total paypal fees for the month and enter this in my book-keeping as an invoice from Paypal (bank fees) with a date at the end of the relevant month

😎 In the book-keeping program (Sage in my case) Pay off the Paypal invoice via the Paypal bank in the relevant month

9) When the end of the month is reconciled the fees will all be taken care of

10) Head in hands moment as the remaining balance (otherwise correct) will still be affected by Paypal 'holding' certain funds due to Ebay returns, disputes etc and not communicating about them.  If these disputes are sorted out, it will all come out in the wash, as Paypal will hold the money until you have received the goods back and officially refunded your customer. but if there is any regular occurrence of returns or disputes from your ebay sales,, then there will be similar imbalances every month.