Paypal sync and QBO

Hi there, Linda Artesani, Artesani Bookkeeping. I wanted to do a tutorial on PayPal. There's a lot of questions revolving PayPal that I get from my clients or I get from working on the community forum. A lot of people struggle with it and the reason why they struggle with the app is it's not a perfect app for sure. It's very complex, it's very rigid is my best description of it. So let's come here. So I've got my sample file and I'm going to hook my PayPal account up to this file. So I came to the Banking tab and it says Connect, so connections I can make. So I'm going to come to PayPal. And as you see, you've got 2 options with PayPal. I can either sync with PayPal, which is using their app. That works best for customers or my clients or yourself as a user, if you use PayPal specifically for one thing, so you either use PayPal to pay bills and use it as a debit card and use it for payment transactions, or you use it like most people use it for, for sales. So they sell a lot of things, they use PayPal, people use PayPal to buy the things, your widgets from you. So most of the people do that, and I think I have one client now that does that and only uses QuickBooks and PayPal for their sales. Any payments they make with their debit cards or any transactions like that that are payments out, they either make them to one vendor, for example UPS, so they only pay UPS out of PayPal, or they don't use it for any vendors and they only use it for the sales side. So you can use it only for sales or only for— Expenses, it'll work beautifully with you, and I'll show you how that works. So, and I'm going to hit confirm. If you only have one company, you only have to do that. So I'm going to authorize it. Now it's setting up my account. And as you can see, it's doing its thing. That's good. Now we're going to dive into the steps. So it's going to ask me, what's the name of your PayPal account in QuickBooks? And it is PayPal. It's actually PayPal, just PayPal. How do you— bank account you want the transactions? I'm just going to pick my Bank of America. I'm going to hit Next. How would you like us to import customer details? Do you want all the names to come in or would you prefer not to have the names come in? If you pick having the names come in and you've got bazillions of names, it's going to bring in all the garbage. You can log into PayPal to get that, so you probably don't want to put all that garbage into your QuickBooks. So I'm going to say no. And it's really up to you. Would you like to import past data? So here's your choices: 6 months, 12 months, or 18 months. Now, what are you going to do if you need 4 months? If you want 4 months, you're going to want to— you're gonna have to delete because there's no way to stop it from bringing in more than what's already there. So this is the thing about it being rigid. It's not really open to doing Importing things in the way you'd like to see them come in. They're very— it's— that's it. Those are your choices, and you're gonna have to go in and delete. If you need 4 months, your best option is 6, and you have to delete 2 months' worth of transactions. That can be a nightmare for some people. So I'm gonna hit Save. Income account, they want to call it PayPal income. I just want to put in the sales income, merchant fees. This is new because they used to always put it into— I have a subcategory for PayPal fees. They always had a PayPal fee account. You had to use. So transaction payment method will be PayPal, any sales tax, and send me emails about app activity is important because if the app stops working you want to know about it. Otherwise you won't know because it's not like a bank feed, you're not going to see that green thing holding all those transactions. So you want to see that it's not working. So here you can just review your preferences and then hit connect. Now my PayPal account doesn't have much happening. I probably use it for a couple of payments and that's about it. I don't really get paid through PayPal I use the awesome QuickBooks Online way of paying, getting payments, but people who sell products, this is actually very common that people use PayPal for. And then it's bringing me back and it's connected. And then I can come into my account and it's connected and I will see the transactions in here connected to my PayPal account. And it will bring in the details. So when you select this, if you're only using it for customers, so if you really need that customer detail, the problem with going with the bank account version of QuickBooks, using QuickBooks and PayPal with the bank version, is it doesn't bring in all that data. So if I sell a widget for $100 and there's a $10 fee, it doesn't take that $10 off and it doesn't even bring that fee in, the merchant fee in. If you use the app, it does. So If you sell a lot of stuff, I recommend using the app because it'll work in the background. As you can see, it's not connected. It doesn't show with green transactions, so many transactions to be imported in. So it doesn't show that. So you wouldn't know if it stopped working unless you go to reconcile and it's not there. But I recommend that and then just transfer the money over to your bank account and use your debit card there for your purchases. I highly recommend working with PayPal in that manner if you have a lot of customers paying you. This way you'll get that nice clean data coming in from PayPal with the sales. If you're using it for both, you can use the bank option for that. However, when you use the bank option for that, sometimes it brings in pending transactions. As you know, with PayPal there are pending transactions, there's external holds, there's a whole litany of things that come through. And it can make it a little complex when it comes to reconciling. So you got to really watch the pending. Don't import them. Don't apply them because you'll end up having duplication. Again, it's important to reconcile. Not every transaction flows through into QuickBooks from the app or the bank feed one. Why? I don't know. And it seems to be certain transactions do come through and sometimes the website ones don't come through or sometimes there's just some Random things that don't come through. So be aware of that fact that you will find that happens. So that's it for hooking up QuickBooks Online using the app. I hope that's helpful. It really does work well if you're using it only for sales or only for expenses. That's the way it works the best for the app. And I will make another video showing you how to connect with the bank feed. And the bank feed way is actually optimal if you're doing sales and expenses in PayPal. Thank you for so much for watching. We'll see you here back next time. Bye now.