I had thought that by ticking the feed box that says “Ignore transfers to or from the bank account” would mean anything paid for by Paypal that used a card (not the paypal balance) would not pull through on the feed when it ran because the actual transaction would show up in the underlying card account. Similarly any payments made using the PayPal balance would show up in the paypal feed because they would not otherwise be visible and hence not accounted for elsewhere in QF
However, it seems that my assumption is incorrect because I made a payment by PayPal that used my AMex card, the transaction has pulled through on both the paypal account and the AMEX account
Firstly is my understanding of the process correct and if so is there a bug somewhere in QF, if not can you help me understand where I’m going wrong?
If you pay for something by PayPal funded by your Amex card then I would expect it to pull through as a money out transaction in both the PayPal feed (which you’d tag as payment to the supplier) and the Amex feed (which you’d tag as a transfer to the PayPal account). What the “ignore transfers” option does is prevent the PayPal fees from pulling the “money in” transaction which is the other end of the transfer from Amex, because this will be created for you when you tag the transfer from the Amex side.
This is correct from an accounting point of view as the payment to the supplier happens at the date when you make the PayPal payment, not the date (a few days later) when the transfer shows up on your card.
Yes that is correct, the purpose of that option is to skip over any payouts going from PayPal to your bank account. This actually should be less of an issue now as we’ve extended the bank transfer matching windows to +/- 5 days.
Hi Glenn,
I hope it is okay to use this post for my issue because it is related.
In my settings for my paypal account I have the box “Ignore transfers from/to bank account” ticked.
At the end of the month Paypal transfers all the money on my account to my bank account and for the last 1 1/2 years it was working fine without any issue. The transfer for this month happened yesterday and quickfile ignored the rule to ignore this transfers and created a 2nd entry. The first one was created from a auto tagging rule within my current bank account.
It is only one transaction per month and not a big issue to delete the duplicate. But I thought there is maybe an bug/issue which you have not noticed so far.
@ian_roberts thanks and understood, it makes perfect sense especially from an audit point of view, some way to automate this would make life easier
Several of my team use Paypal for the added ease of querying payments (vs trying to ask a card company to stop an ongoing subscription or similar) by doing so they create a very predictable trail
Buy Something > Pay with ?? Card through paypal > paypal then takes money from card ?? > paypal then sends the money to the vendor
The entry then appears on the card statement as a debit to paypal and on the paypal statement as a debit and credit so you end up with three very predictable transactions all of which need tagging appropriately
vs
Had they paid with the card it’s just one transaction - in reality the process is no different it’s just that the process of debits and credits are hidden in the card processors technology and just presented to the cardholder as one transaction
It would be great if so simple methodology in QF could recognise that PayPal transactions follow this process and automatically do the tagging of all three transactions in one go
The only real exception is when something is paid for from the paypal balance but this would be easy to detect and trap
This is again something that you can probably automate with bank tagging rules - e.g. auto-tag any money out transaction that contains the word “paypal” as a transfer to the PayPal merchant account. Then the only thing you’d have to tag manually would be the actual money out of the PayPal merchant account to the supplier. There’s no difference then between payments from the PayPal balance and payments funded by a card - the payment to supplier is always the “money out” from the PayPal account, and whether it was funded by PayPal balance or by card is just a matter of whether or not there’s a transfer from the card account a few days later to compensate.
I appreciate I can do that, my thinking behind posting was that perhaps if others have the same issue it maybe worth QF looking at it for the benefit of all, if it’s just me then I’ll be happy to set up the rule just for me.
