I’ve looked through the forums all day, and a couple times over the past few days before I realised this was actually an issue caused by an update.
This time last year I imported my PayPal transactions and my Stripe transactions for the year. A few small tweaks and job done. This year customer names aren’t being imported. After a massive headache and eventually discovering it’s due to a Manager update (WHY?!?!), I still have no clue how to import PayPal or Stripe transactions with the Payer/Payee name. I’ve tried editing table column names, I’ve tried adding table column names. Nothing works, every import has the payee/payer field empty. Now this was a “fair enough” thing for one business with not many transactions, but now I’m trying to import transactions for my other business and there’s a LOT more transactions - too many to manually add at this point before due date. It worked fine this time last year, how do I get it to work now?
When I try and straight up import CSV from PayPal export like I did last year everything works the same as before (that I’ve seen so far) except the customer names don’t get imported. I tried the QIF export too this time and that also didn’t add customer names either. I did try use the batch update function to find out the columns responsible for customers and the “Other” category but renaming the customer column and adding a column with “Other” as the category didn’t work. It’s Christmas and I was hoping to have it all out of the way by now but I’ll hop back on it tomorrow and try again experimenting - hopefully I can have it done by the end of the year. I operate an ecommerce website and most of my customers aren’t recurring (and there’s thousands) so I don’t see the need of importing each individual customer and connecting them as customers in the table, so the old method and “Other” category should work fine for that. I’m just curious what other people do with PayPal/Stripe imports because surely a lot of other people do imports too and with tax season it must get asked a lot but I couldn’t find anything helpful in the forums here.
Okay so following up, I’ve tried pretty much everything I can think of to import customer names from PayPal exports and it seems it’s now impossible.
I’ve tried removing the “Customer” “Supplier” tabs hoping it might remove the function, I’ve tried setting the defaults to “Other”, I’ve tried copying the relevant column names from a Manager export (batch update) and adding them to the PayPal CSV and no matter what I try the Payer/Payee field ends up empty after importing. Even if I did somehow manage to import customers and suppliers to the customers and suppliers it appears those get encrypted into a string of letters & numbers so I’d need to cross-reference the customer names with those strings on the PayPal export - I actually think I did try that for a small test import and even that failed.
I need to hand over my accounts in the next 2 days so I think all I can do at this point is just import everything without the customer names so at least I have the figures I need.
Bizarre why the devs would make this change from the old method which in my opinion worked fine. Strange nobody else has replied with what they do with PayPal, I guess the Manager userbase isn’t as big as I thought (or everybody’s just enjoying a break after such a rough year)
To do batch create you have to create a variety of entries manually then do a batch update to see the format of each entry type.
Things that can not be created manually are very unlikely to be supported by batch create.
You are correct invoices, payments and receipt can all be linked to a customer or supplier. The linkage is via a GUID (a hexadeximal number). To make it human readable you need to do a data base look up (use batch update on the customer / supplier tab to get a list of all customer/supplier GUID). I believe Lubos would like to replace the GUID in batch update with a human readable Name field however doing so requires all users make all all their Name fields unique, so is not at all easy.
In payments and receipt you can also enter free text for type “Other” entries. Doing so means that the payment / receipt can never be linked by manager to a specific suppler or customer. In your case this is probably what you want, so may work for your data importing.
Hi @Patch, thanks for replying. Yes the issue I’m having is with your last paragraph, I can’t seem to be able to import “Other” entries for Payments and Receipts Payee/Payer no matter what I’ve tried. Have you had any luck or is this just a “me” issue?
For a Batch Create / Batch Update, if using the Other PayerPayeeType (AJ), leave both the Customer (AK) and Supplier (AL) columns blank. Instead, fill the customer names in the Contact (X) column.