I’ve had a PayPal account for a long time, but previously only accounted for purchases using the credit card account funding them, and the bank feed from the credit card. Income was immediately transferred to the main bank account (also a feed) and accounted there.
Recently, I started making a number of small sales using PayPal, so decided to implement the PayPal feed. This is giving problems. The balance in QuickFile does not match the actual PayPal balance.
The reason for this is that purchases funded by credit card appear in the bank feed, but the money from the credit card does not. To correct the balance, these transactions have to be deleted from the QuickFile PayPal account. They will be accounted for in the credit card account.
Just to confuse matters a bit more, a euro purchase came through as different amounts for the credit card and PayPal account.
Is there any way to stop the card funded purchases from coming through into QuickFile? Or am I stuck with manually identifying and deleting them?
Hi,
When buying something via paypal account and using your credit card, you should record the purchase in your paypal merchant account in quickfile. The money from your credit card you used to pay the paypal purchase should be recorded as a ‘transfer between bank accounts’ - from your credit card to paypal. The amount you paid should be come into quickfile via your credit card feed. Click on Tag and then on Transfer between accounts and select your paypal account. That will create a tagged money in transaction in your paypal merchant account in quickfile.
Thanks, I can see the logic of that. The trouble is, that won’t deal with the issue that the PayPal account balance will often not match the balance shown by PayPal because of the delay in processing credit card transactions. There is also the euro transaction, where the credit card charge was not the same as the purchase in the PayPal feed.
Yes, that is right and correct. There will be always delays of some sort - you write an invoice and the customer pays 2 weeks later or so. If you use the credit card feed then there will be delays. You could enter this manually but then you will have to delete the entry brought in by the feed.
Between your purchase and the day your credit card provider handles the payment are a few days. On those days there is also a change in currency exchange rates. In addition your credit card provider may charges a few for foreign transactions/purchases. For both, bank fee and difference in exchange rates, you have to account as well.
The gap between invoice and payment is something else altogether. I don’t have a problem with bank account or credit card account failing to have balances in the accounts that match the actual accounts. The euro transaction was charged to my credit card account by PayPal in sterling, so card fees don’t apply. I’m afraid I have no intention of attempting to manually account for exchange differences and fees on a total amount of £6!
It sounds as if the most practical solution is to pay from PayPal balance whenever possible, although PayPal doesn’t help by defaulting to credit card. And deleting the transactions from PayPal seems to be the least bad way to handle the rest. If PayPal and the credit card were more like my Starling account and handled most things instantly, it might be different.