Just thought I would report a small paypal feed bug I just found.
We received an echeque payment for £24 of which 0.66p was fees from paypal. In the feed it picked up this £24 income before the cheque was cleared despite the funds not being released by paypal - that was bug 1 (and didn’t pick up the 66p transaction cost as well).
Then, a week later the cheque cleared and the funds got released and in theory everything should now tally, but, it is 66p out as the transaction costs never got picked up - bug 2.
If we received a lot of echeques we could easily fall out of synch easily.
account is ****411989 if you want to look, transaction 13th nov. I will be entering a journal entry today tho for the 66p to keep things in synch.
I’ve never come across PayPal echeques before? We just interpret what’s in the feed… there are actually nearly 100 different transaction types in PayPal, many of which aren’t directly relevant to bookkeeping. We’ll take a look at this shortly and see if we can apply a filter.
not a criticism, you guys do a great job, and i know PP are a law unto their own and a real pain, but felt you would like to know as you seem to like to keep on improving.
No, it’s actually very helpful to understand these different scenarios. It helps us to improve the feed over time. We need to go and have a look to see exactly what PayPal are delivering in the feed and then plan a workaround. We’re just in the process of looking at this now.
OK our engineer has got back to me on this. So what happens is that on the 13th November we call the feed and they show the £24 e-cheque as lodged but uncleared. The feed shows no charge at this point, we record this as such with the income and no processing fee. At no point on any feed going forward (i.e. 14th, 15th, 16th Nov etc) do PayPal notify us that the e-cheque has cleared. The only way we can know is by polling the 13th again, which is crazy as we’d need to do effectively poll back 7 days on every single PayPal account to track this. In my view a financial statement issued should never change like this, it makes it almost impossible to effectively reconcile.
The best hope we have of getting this resolved is to report it to PayPal, which we will be doing today. Hopefully they can put some heads together and come up with a solution.
our experience with them is anything but great so good luck lol