A PayPal 'Credit card payment' is a sale, not a transfer

Running all of PayPal's documented transaction types through ai-bookkeeper's built-in rules found a customer payment booked as a transfer.

Tools and projects · 1 min read · Source
ai-bookkeeperpaypalbookkeeping

ai-bookkeeper imports PayPal's activity CSV as "Name - Type" lines. PayPal publishes the full list of its transaction types (157 event codes). We ran each description through the keyword layer, once as money in and once as money out.

One fault mattered: Credit card payment (a customer paying you by card) was booked as a transfer, because the rule for paying off your own credit card matched the words. Nine other sale types and six fee types were left blank, and withdrawals to your bank and currency conversions were not seen as transfers.

Four rules, anchored on the type at the end of the line, fix those; the plain bank wording (PAYMENT THANK YOU, CREDIT CARD PAYMENT on a statement) is unchanged. Holds, refunds and tax withholding are left for review on purpose.

Caveat: this is PayPal's reference, not a real export. The CSV's Type column may spell some types differently, so the next step is a real activity file.

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