My Paypal feed is a complete mess. You just can’t account for it all properly. I have 5 different currencies in my Paypal account and we do thousands of transactions per month and lots of refunds. The transactions come in under a username, as full price, the refunds come in separately as a refund and then a separate line-item for the paypal fees refund so you can never match anything up to the right accounts. Plus currency conversions from balances come in as sales etc - it’s a mess.
I read somewhere a while ago that you recommended switching off the Paypal feed and just manually putting in a line item that showed the sales in Paypal for the month, and how much VAT was there in the month, but I can’t find the article.
We appreciate the currency conversion can be tricky. Unfortunately PayPal doesn’t provide us with an exchange rate (we wish they would - it would make things much easier for our users).
On your bank overview screen, find your PayPal account. Click the green ‘Feed Settings’ button:
Currency conversions are always tricky, even more so when there are fees involved too (e.g. PayPal fees).
In an ideal situation, PayPal would give you the exchange rate and you can log everything in your account in one currency. However, you may find that creating several PayPal holding accounts on QuickFile would be more suitable (one for each currency). But it may still be tricky to keep track of your balance etc., and I’d consider the following method a better option.
Generally, logging payments received etc. on a weekly/monthly basis, it’s more like running a shop - you bulk the sales and log it as one invoice and one client (something like “PayPal Sales”), and then create one money in transaction at the end of that period, and one money out transaction for the fees to PayPal - both figures should be available via the PayPal dashboard.
Personally, I’d log everything on a monthly basis using a report from the PayPal dashboard, which I’d hope would give me all the GBP transactions (e.g. all the foreign currency transactions that have been converted). Unfortunately, I don’t have access to a sample of this data, so I’m not 100% sure what they provide, but hopefully it could be worked into a situation like this.
