PayPal Accounting of USD Transactions and Withdrawls

David Gilbert

Hi. Since repeated questions to Wave support have not satisfied my questions as to how to properly manage these transactions I'm hoping there is a genius out there who could spare some time and advise how I can fix this mess I've got.

So there are basically a few scenarios I need help with. All have commonalities in that my PayPal account is linked to my Wave account.

1) pay for services in USD through PayPal, with payments coming from either my CDN$ bank account or CDN$ Amex card

2) invoice as normal in USD but receive payment in USD through PayPal and either a) withdraw the funds immediately into my CDN$ bank account or b) leave in the PayPal account to pay for full or part of services in USD

I am having a horrible time reconciling my PayPal USD account at the end of the month, how to properly accounting for the correct CDN income or expense to report (ie what transactions to modify/add), properly understanding what goes on behind the scenes so I know when to "detachthis source record and create another transaction with this record", "Delete this source record. The parent transaction will not be deleted," or even "Split the transaction" if necessary.

An example is as follows (2 lines from PayPal):

Description Amount Category Account

Transfer In $10 Transfer To PayPal USD (ie from CDN$ Credit card)

Training Co[Payment, Completed] $10 Education & Training (expense name) PayPal USD

The issue I have is, how do I record the "actual" expense at, say, $13.30 CDN as shown in my Amex statement. It's easier to just delete these records and manually enter a new transaction in CDN$ but I want to be able to balance my PayPal USD account.

Similar to this is a revenue transaction. Easier to send screen shots than try to type this all out. Suffice to say I'm not looking for "accounting" advice, just how to figure out how to get Wave to do what I need it to do.

Thanks!

Dante_Bulluck

Hey David. Based on what you've said, I think this is partially a challenge of the integration not being as simple as it should be. Personally, I have been advised that a connection/automated import might be more of a headache than a transaction upload, because of transfers to and from or pending transactions sometimes being imported to my account as actuals, etc. and needing more direct oversight than if I were to upload or enter them myself and ensure that they were correct. Going forward, you might find it easier to import CSVs to your Paypal account in Wave, because transfers to and from your bank account may not be imported correctly and entering these items yourself is less confusing than "unlinking" as you mentioned.

Firstly, currency and account are 1:1 in Wave. Secondly, transfers in multicurrency don't always work. They can fail if they amounts vary too widely. You need to create transfers in order to record these transactions.

1) Here you would need two items: a transfer between your bank account and your Paypal account for the amount you paid, and an expense to your Paypal account.

2) In either case, you would record an income transaction to your Paypal account. For the former, you would then create a transfer to your bank account for the amount you were paid.