PayPal reconciliation from activity report to bank deposit
Reconciles automates PayPal reconciliation. You download the activity report from PayPal, upload it with your bank statement, and Reconciles separates sales, fees, refunds and currency conversions, matches every transfer to the bank deposit it produced and exports the entries your ledger needs.
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What makes PayPal hard to reconcile
PayPal is a balance, not a bank account that pays out on a fixed schedule. Sales come in at their gross amount, fees are taken right away, refunds go out from the same balance, and money reaches your bank only when it is transferred out, automatically or by hand.
- One transfer to the bank can contain sales from many days.
- Fees are recorded per transaction, not per transfer.
- Currency conversions create extra lines in the activity report.
- Holds and reversals change the balance between transfers.
The result is a monthly gap between PayPal sales, the PayPal balance and the bank, which someone has to explain line by line.
How to reconcile PayPal with Reconciles, step by step
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01 Download the activity report from PayPal
In your PayPal business account, open the activity download and export all transactions for the period you are closing as CSV, including balance affecting transactions. Download your bank statement for the same period from your bank.
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02 Upload both files
Drop the bank statement in the first slot and the PayPal report in the second. Reconciles reads the transaction type, the gross amount, the fee, the net amount, the currency and the balance of every line.
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03 Review matches and exceptions
Transfers to the bank are matched to deposits with the activity behind each one listed. Sales are matched to invoices or orders by amount, reference and customer name. Lines that do not reconcile, such as a transfer that never arrived or a refund with no original sale, go to the exceptions queue with the reason shown.
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04 Export entries back to your ledger
Approved adjustments come out as journal entries: PayPal fees to their cost account, refunds against revenue, conversion differences on their own line, and the PayPal clearing account brought back to the balance in the report. Import the CSV into QuickBooks, Xero or NetSuite.
What PayPal reconciliation with Reconciles covers
- PayPal transfers vs bank deposits.
- PayPal sales vs open invoices or ecommerce orders, see invoice reconciliation software.
- Fees, refunds and reversals booked to the right accounts.
- Multi-currency balances, with each conversion shown separately.
- The PayPal clearing account in your ledger vs the closing balance of the report.
Rules that learn your PayPal patterns
Matching rules let you describe recurring items once: transfers named a certain way, fees on a specific account, refunds for a given product line. Rules run every month before AI suggestions, so they do not use your suggestion limit, and on Growth and Scale you can save as many as you need. Read more on how automated reconciliation works.
PayPal alongside Stripe, Shopify and Amazon
If you sell through several channels, reconcile them in the same workspace against the same bank account. See Stripe reconciliation, Amazon settlement reconciliation and the overview on the ecommerce reconciliation software page.
A PayPal transfer, explained
Say $2,300 arrives in your bank from PayPal on the 12th. The activity report shows that transfer was preceded by twenty sales totaling $2,450, $85 in fees and a $65 refund. Reconciles adds the lines between this transfer and the previous one, confirms they explain the $2,300, and lists every part under the match. If a sale was in euros, the conversion line is paired with it and the difference is shown separately. When the numbers do not add up, the transfer goes to the exceptions queue with the gap in dollars, so you know exactly what to look for.
PayPal reconciliation questions
The activity download of all transactions for the period in CSV, with balance affecting transactions included. It carries the gross, fee and net amount of each line.
Yes. Each PayPal account counts as one payment account. Starter includes 3 accounts in total, Growth 15 and Scale 60.
Each currency is normalized on its own and conversions are matched as pairs, with the difference shown separately.
Reconcile a month of PayPal activity
Upload your bank statement and the PayPal activity report. You see the first matched transfers before you create an account. Compare plans on the pricing page.