A large part of managing a business includes planning for the future. And to do that, you need good insight into your sales so you can optimise your expenses (like fees and shipping costs) and plan for future orders and growth.
There are three main insights that can help with the day to day of running a business– what orders have come in, what’s going on with money, and are there are any issues. With PayPal we have several reports that can help with just that. Here is a summarised list of what report you can access and how to use them.
Sales insights is perfect if you don’t need to drill into the detail but would like a quick visual guide to how your business is performing. At a glance, you can see how your sales, transactions and average sale price is tracking and how it varies over a chosen timeframe and compare the data against last year’s results to see your overall year on year growth.
In Sales insights you can also get a map view of where your sales are coming from and see how much repeat business you’re getting.
Head to Reports then click Insights. You can tab through to check changes to your sales, transactions and average selling price. Then scroll down to check the map and repeat customer data.
Monthly statements, like those provided by your bank, consolidate balances, payments, fees, chargebacks and refunds, listing all transactions from beginning to ending balance for each currency you use. They’re automatically generated by the 10th of each month and available for two years.
To access your monthly statements, go to Reports in your PayPal account, then click Statements, then Monthly.
Some accounting software (like Intuit QuickBooks Online and Xero) let you link your PayPal account to automatically sync your transaction history. If yours doesn’t yet, you can manually import your transactions by downloading your history log.
To download your history log, go to Reports in your PayPal account, choose your filters and click Create Report.
Your history log is customisable, letting you choose a date range (up to 7 years) and set exactly how much or little detail you need, such as payments received, invoices and refunds.
Disputes and chargebacks is a helpful report that lets you keep an eye on any issues raised by customers. Each report lets you view the details of all disputes, claims and chargebacks associated with your account, including response due dates, case outcomes and any buyer comments.
Head to the Reports section of your PayPal account to generate a one-off report, or click Daily report to have them generated for you automatically each day.
Your settlement report is your most important one. It provides information about each transaction that affects the balance of your account, such as sales, transfers, monthly fees and refunds. It’s useful for reconciling transactions with your bank statements and provides your beginning and ending balance for each currency you use.
Your transactions detail report is similar to your settlements report, but it also includes non-balance affecting transaction lines. It’s useful for helping you facilitate things like fulfilment, account maintenance and payment audits.
To access these reports, you’ll need to create subscriptions. This can be done by going to Reports, then clicking Transactions in your PayPal business account. They’ll be generated daily into either CSV or tab-delimited formats for you to download when you need them. We’ll store up to 45 days of reports for you in your PayPal account.
In a CSV or tab-delimited format, the reports can be difficult to make heads or tails from, so we recommend opening them in an Excel spreadsheet. When doing so, format all money amount fields to 2 decimal places to avoid confusion – they’re initially listed in cents, not dollars.
Each line item includes a transaction event code (T-code) which tells you what the transaction was, from an Express Checkout API payment to a chargeback or transfer. Definitions of each code can be found in the specifications documents, available from the Help and documentation section of Reports in your account.
Many of our reports are customisable so you can get the data you need when you need it. But if you’re looking for all available data so you can work through everything yourself, or just want data for certain keywords, transaction amounts or transaction types, you can do that too.
Head to Activity download, choose All transactions in Transaction type and click Customise report fields and tick all field types you’d like to download.
Whatever information you need to analyse and grow your business is at your fingertips. If you haven’t already, head on over to Reports in your PayPal account and start exploring your payment data to find what works for you.
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