Proper way to record PayPal payment from bank account

I pay much of my supply expenses using PayPal while most sales receipts are automatically deposited into a bank account. Each are setup in Manager as Bank Accounts.

When recording my monthly payment to PayPal, I have been doing a manual “Transfer money” from the bank account to PayPal and it has worked well for the past year.

This month, I tried to automate the process and include that payment from the bank along with the other transactions listed in the PayPal import (Import Bank Statement). However, the bank’s eCheck payment to PayPal came in as an “Uncategorized transaction” because it didn’t know which account to allocate it to. I was wondering if there was a ‘proper’ way to do this before going back to the manual transfer.

Which Account should be selected in a case like this? When doing a “Transfer money”, both PayPal and the bank accounts are listed, but not here (appears like a “Receive money” transaction). My Chart of Accounts has been working great so far with everything balancing to the penny, so I was hesitant to experiment and add something that could throw everything off. Thanks for any advice.

For now, if you are importing your bank statements, the best way is to have an account called Inter-account transfers under your Equity section in your chart of accounts.

Then allocate all uncategorized transactions which represent transfers into this account. The idea is that the balance of this account should always come to zero as what comes in will always come out.

When you say you tried to automate the process were you trying to replace your manual transfer money with a bank rule? Bank Transfer is a short hand transaction but when you use Bank Rules you need to do the long hand transaction - Read here for previous discussion - in your case use Bank/PayPal instead of Bank/Cash