EDIT: Is there some way I can calculate the total income and expenses that occur in paypal each month without wasting a hundred hours hand keying in all of the items???
All I really need is to have these totals at the end of each month.
Total brought in LEST PP fees.
Total Spent.
I need to get some software to help me manage all my expenses, and to use for tax purposes. In the next week or so I will be getting an actual business license, and I think what was recommended for me is a sub S corporation if it matters.
Mostly what I want to be able to do is import PP info for tax purposes, but the other expense tracking stuff will be nice too. I really have no clue as to which version I need. I have seen cheap versions on line that are downloadable for like fifty bucks all the way up to $1000 dollar versions.
QB will not natively import PP transactions. You have to pay a pricey monthly fee - around $30 I think. I found some software by Big Red that I bought but it never worked reliably. Instead I made a spread sheet that calculated my COGS automatically. I had to create my price list and then just copy and paste in my transactions. For my purposes it works well. You could still use QB for tracking overhead expenses, etc...but I never found it useful for COGS unless you want to hand key in every transaction.
I can’t think of any reason you would need to keep track of PayPal fees on a per transaction basis. At the end of the year, PayPal will make your yearly totals available on one sheet, and that will lump all of your PayPal fees into one easy number, and also exactly how much in payments you took in. If you don’t have a separate PayPal account for your business yet, you should get one. Keep business and personal accounts separate, so your yearly totals will be as easy as transfering totals. Keep the best track you can of the cost of your materials, and your cost of the merchandise you buy, to make end of year inventory easier to figure out. I just use a simple spreadsheet program. You can make your spreadsheet exactly what you need, and can keep it as simple as possible. Unless you are actually going to make your business a corporation, which you probably won’t, run it like a small business, and keep things as simple as possible.
I have been running my business on Ebay for over 15 years, and I haven’t needed any more than a simple spreadsheet program, and buying TurboTax Home & Business every year. If you are running a small business (under $100,000 revenue), keep it simple, and leave the corporate complexity to the big guys.
In other words, my vote goes to using a regular spreadsheet for the day to day, and only deal with PayPal yearly totals.
Ok, it sounds like you guys are on the right track. I have changed the title of the OP. I agree skipping the quickbooks is the right thing to do.
This spread sheet sounds ok. I really need to be able to have an automatic total on these numbers. A copy an paste is a little bit of an upgrade from where I am at now, but fully automated is where I need to be. With all of the very small transactions for sinkpads and similar items I'm not getting rich off of this, but ins literally thousands and thousands of digits to calculate.
So far the only thing I have found that claims to be able to import PP transactions like that is Outright.
you can custom design a template with whatever data fields you want in Access and then just download Paypal data quarterly or monthly as a CSV file and import it, or just use Excel instead and just do a little more sorting to get your desired results.
