Downloading PayPal Payment History for Your Records

Good recordkeeping is important for an eBay seller. That’s why PayPal allows you to download records of your buying and selling activity, in either a monthly or quarterly format.

To download your records, first log in to PayPal. Then, with the My Account tab selected, choose History→Download History. From there, you can tell PayPal which date range you want information for and what format you want the files in.

Recordkeeping means keeping track of everything: Every penny, sou, farthing, or ruble that you spend or take in. In the United States (and in most other countries), we have a little thing called taxes. We all have to turn in tax returns of several sorts when we run a business — and they’d better be correct. There may come a day when you receive a letter from a State or Federal tax agency asking to take a look at your books. This is simply a nice way of saying the dreaded word, audit.

The best defense against an audit is to have backup records. The more records you have proving your business income and expenses, the less painful your audit will be. One excellent piece of information to have at your fingertips is your PayPal history.

Besides meeting tax-reporting requirements, keeping good records keeps you on top of your business dealings. PayPal helps you with this all-important recordkeeping by providing reports on your buying and selling activity with these features:

• 24/7 availability: PayPal allows you to customize and download your transaction reports at any time.

  
  

  You might want to consider downloading your reports on a monthly or quarterly basis — as well as generating one big report at the end of the year. Or you may want to download the reports to coincide with your state sales-tax payments (for backup documentation) or to keep a record of your monthly totals.

  
  



• Various formats: You can download reports in several formats. The most flexible is a comma-delimited file that you can open and edit in a spreadsheet program, such as Excel or Microsoft Works.

  
  

dummies

Source:http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/downloading-paypal-payment-history-for-your-record.html