PayPal fees - how to show?

I have an app which receives IPNs from PayPal whenever someone buys
contact, project and invoice for accounting.

The product is, for example, 25 GBP + VAT, so PayPal collects 30 GBP
and deducts 1.22 GBP and I get 28.78 GBP. In my PayPal account visible
through FreeAgent I see a payment received of 28.78 which I need to
match up with my 30 GBP invoice.

When I try to reconcile I can match up the payment but it leaves the
generated invoice 1.22 short.

How does anyone else handle this situation?

I don’t want to correct the mismatch by adding another item line to
the invoice for -1.22 as this would leave the invoice for 28.78 when
the customer has paid 30.

The 1.22 is actually part of my overhead and money effectively paid
out so how do I get this into FreeAgent in a way that I can later
reconcile?

Any suggestions?

Not sure how you would do this with the API but from an accounting point of view, you would record the transaction as having an invoice value of £30. Just like how you can explain a payment as less than the invoice value (part payment), it is equally valid to explain a payment as the full invoice alum even though the actual value is less.

If you were to do this in the web interface, you would now be left with an unexplained -£1.22 in the bank transactions rather than a shortfall on the invoice. You would then explain this as an expense (banking fees for instance).

Hi Brian,

Could you please raise a support ticket for this at support@freeagent.com?
Please mention my name in the ticket and that you’ve emailed the API
group. My support team colleagues will be able to help you with the
accounting side of this and then we can look at the API implications.

Thanks,

GraemeOn 20 March 2012 11:48, Brian Lowe b.lowe@volcanic.co.uk wrote:

I have an app which receives IPNs from PayPal whenever someone buys
from my website and uses the FreeAgent API to create a corresponding
contact, project and invoice for accounting.

The product is, for example, 25 GBP + VAT, so PayPal collects 30 GBP
and deducts 1.22 GBP and I get 28.78 GBP. In my PayPal account visible
through FreeAgent I see a payment received of 28.78 which I need to
match up with my 30 GBP invoice.

When I try to reconcile I can match up the payment but it leaves the
generated invoice 1.22 short.

How does anyone else handle this situation?

I don’t want to correct the mismatch by adding another item line to
the invoice for -1.22 as this would leave the invoice for 28.78 when
the customer has paid 30.

The 1.22 is actually part of my overhead and money effectively paid
out so how do I get this into FreeAgent in a way that I can later
reconcile?

Any suggestions?


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Graeme Boyd
Senior Software Engineer
FreeAgent Central Ltd
40 Torphichen Street, Edinburgh EH3 8JB
Registered in Scotland SC316774

I have the same question about accounting for PayPal fees. Was this ever resolved?