My PayPal Integration workaround
XboxHacker
Member Posts: 1
I first came to Wave for the receipt scanning, then when I Found PayPal integration I was hooked!
But like most, I was sorely disappointed with how it works (if it works). I am missing TONs of transactions from months! I wanted to at least salvage my account receipts, and at least finish the rest of this year just to make it easy on me and tax guy.
So after disconnecting and reconnecting the PayPal integration, changing the date, and overall waiting for it to work. I decided to figure out a better way to use PayPal with Wave.
In this community they suggest to download reports from PayPal and upload them to Wave. This seems to be ok...but not great. In my reports I see holds and all kinds of junk in the report. Lots of stuff that does not need to go into Wave. Plus all my purchases are bulk labeled as "General PayPal Debit Card Transaction". And not the merchant name, as it would have been with the integration.
So what I did is basically copied my account transactions from the main PayPal screen, put them into Excel, then uploaded them to Wave. I will go into more detail below. I did one for each month. I did have to go and delete EVERY transaction that the integration did import. You can start a new account to make it real easy.
Now I have proper merchant names, sales, PayPal fees, and all the goodies uploaded to my Wave. Nice and neat...with NOTHING missing.
This is how I do it, and it works for me! Your mileage may vary.
HOW TO:
- Open your PayPal and goto Activities tab.
- Select the month range you want to do (I did mine one month at a time)
- Hold down the keyboard space bar, this will index the screen all the way to the bottom. You need to do this till it no longer says "Show More Transactions"
- Copy EVERYTHING in all the columns on the activity page.
Open Excel:
- Start a new blank book
- Paste all the data to the book.
- Save it to Comma Delimited CSV file type. Says yes to the warnings. This will remove most of the PayPal website formatting.
- Close and reopen the file.
You will need to use "Find And Replace" for these:
- Shipped
- Completed
- USD
You will need to replace theses with blank spaces (remove them) Wave wont work with USD in the amount row!
You will now need to remove the "empty" rows, from Shipping and Completed.
Go to Find & Select>Go To Specials>Blanks
This should highlight all the blank/empty rows. Right click and Delete. Shift all cells UP. Double check you didn't mess any rows up, and everything worked out fine.
Now you can start to delete columns you don't need.
You will only need these:
- Date
- Description
- Gross
- Fees
You will need to format the gross and fees columns with "General - non specific format" This will remove the $ and leave positive and negative numbers.
Save the file and upload to Wave, use ONLY the Date, Desc and Gross columns
PayPal Fees:
You will have to make 2 CSV files if you want to add the PayPal fees to Wave.
- Sort the CSV by the Fees column
- Delete all the rows that don't have anything to do with fees.
- Save the file as a new file with a new file name.
- Exit and reopen the file
You will need to make a new column with a "renamed" description. Call it Desc2.
In a blank column type this:
=CONCATENATE(B2,"[PayPal Fee]")
B2 is the description column, change it to what ever you need to. Now drag copy the cell to apply to all the desc you need to change.
This is how you will able to fine it easily in Wave AND upload to wave when it asked for a description column.
Should look this this:
| Date | Desc | Gross | Fees | Desc2 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 8-Jul-19 | John Doe | 259.35 | -7.82 | John Doe[PayPal Fee] |
Save the file and upload to Wave. This time use ONLY the Date, Desc2 and Fees columns.
You want to make sure to use the FEE and DESC2 column this time, NOT the gross and Desc!
Wave will give you a warning that you are going to import data that you have already imported. If you are 100% sure you used the Fees and Desc2 columns you can click OK.
Wave will import it and you will have 2 transactions for John Doe on that date. One is a sale and one is a fee.
Comments
Hey @XboxHacker! I just wanted to thank you so much for taking the time to share this workflow. We know that the PayPal integration is temperamental, to say the least! I know that this advice is really going to help so many Wave users. Thanks again
I only recently noticed that none of my paypal income is coming into Wave. It used to work seamlessly. I have no idea what changed, but it is inconvenient at best. I will now have to upload all payments and their transaction fees. Thanks for the above tips.
Hey @melissaw! Thanks for reaching out! I'm sorry to hear this has stopped working for you recently. Once connected, the PayPal connection 'should' import automatically. However, there is an issue that has been known to occur that stops the automation from happening. If you go to your menu and click Integrations > Click the pen icon to the right of the PayPal integration to edit > you will be able to adjust the date field to import from one day prior to the date you currently have listed. Doing this should act as a manual refresh and prompt the system to pull any transactions that have not been imported. We advise against disconnecting then reconnecting the PayPal integration as this will result in a new category getting added to your Chart of Accounts (and having to move all transactions over to the new category).
If this doesn't resolve the issue and allow for automatic imports (which you should see after a few days), it's possible that you're affected. As an alternative, you can upload statements or use Wave Connect to get your transactions into Wave. @XboxHacker has also kindly shared their workaround to this in great detail as well (thank you)!
@EmmaP - thank you, I will give that a try. To be clear, it's only some transactions that are being left off -mostly income. I am wondering it it's because we use multiple email addresses for the same account. The ones for my email come in, but the ones for sales@ do not. It's weird.