PayPal Download History not Downloading

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PayPal BugWe’re hearing complaints from sellers that they’re unable to download their PayPal history. We’ve heard the occasional complaint for a couple of months now so it does appear to be a ongoing issue.

Being able to download your PayPal history is pretty important for some sellers. At the end of the financial year (which has just passed) sellers need to balance the books for their income tax returns. Others need to obtain exact figures for the VAT returns each quarter.

Other sellers who are more organised will want to download their PayPal history monthly, weekly or daily to reconcile their sales records with PayPal’s records.

Have you tried to download your PayPal history and were you successful?

27 Responses

  1. Thanks Chris for putting this up. We’ve been struggling with this since the end of Feb and we know we’re not alone. Initially noticed the problem trying to download transactions to complete the last quarters VAT return (Due March 7th). We usually download a 3-month chunk, but that failed, so did a one month chunk and a weeks’ worth – no joy.

    I’ve only had one successful download – that took 7 hours to process a single day’s request (15 transactions on that day!) Not ideal when you need to download 3 months’ worth. It takes 30 hours for a failed download to time out and you can only request 3 at once.

    Paypal have been less than forthcoming on what the problem is. They’ve admitted that there’s an issue within a minute of our initial call to CS and put a ‘Critical’ marker on our account, but don’t seem to be able to help. They offer to email over the transaction report, but that never happens.

    I’d be very interested to see how widespread the issue is, or maybe its not a well used feature these days. Either way, its not great having to call up HMRC and have them estimate your VAT bill. At this rate, we’ll be doing that for this quarter too.

  2. This was a major pain for us.
    On 2 different paypal accounts we found that the history downloads kept failing.
    I then phoned them and they had to initiate it on the paypal side and then send a secure attachment using Cissco security.
    This required a login and password to be able to download the secure attachment.

    An absolute pain in the arse that took over a week to sort.

  3. Ever since I have been running an online business I have used those reports every month for sales reconciliation so I was very flummoxed whenI tried to download March data as normal on 1 April. Several calls to paypal and transfers from here to there and basically its broken, they know it is but dont know when its going to be fixed

    There are however many other reports now in Paypal and I found all the relevant data fairly simply so was able to complete my management accounts without an issue

  4. This has been causing us problems since the beginning of March when the new PayPal UI was launched. We run reports daily in order to keep our Sage accounts up to date. Before the new UI reports would run in a matter of seconds, then all of sudden they started taking hours and in many cases failing completely. So instead of having our Sage accounts up-to-date each day we started to having to wait 1, 2 or even 3 days.
    Over a month later and nothing is better.
    We have spoken to PayPal and were told it was a known problem and would be fixed in a few days…. It was not and that was when we raised the issue on the PayPal Community Forum…
    PayPal are proving to be wholly inadequate on this occasion. This facility is essential for anyone running a proper business. PayPal need to sort this out quickly, it has already been far too long and is frankly unacceptable.
    As with most eBay sellers our hands are completely tied, we have to use PayPal and we have no real alternative.

  5. We’ve been struggling with this since the end of Feb and we know we’re not alone. Initially noticed the problem trying to download transactions to complete the last quarters VAT return (Due March 7th). We usually download a 3-month chunk, but that failed, so did a one month chunk and a weeks’ worth.

    I’ve only had one successful download – that took 7 hours to process a single day’s request (15 transactions on that day!) Not ideal when you need to download 3 months’ worth. It takes 30 hours for a failed download to time out and you can only request 3 at once.

    Paypal have been less than forthcoming on what the problem is. They’ve admitted that there’s an issue within a minute of our initial call to CS and put a ‘Critical’ marker on our account, but don’t seem to be able to help. They offer to email over the transaction report, but that never happens.

    I’d be very interested to see how widespread the issue is, or maybe it’s not a well-used feature these days. Either way, it’s not great having to call up HMRC and have them estimate your VAT bill. At this rate, we’ll be doing that for this quarter too.

  6. The issue is affecting my daily work since 3 months.

    I have sent several complaints to the CS of Paypal, but so far no solution.

    Today I got an answer, that the technicans are working to solve the problem, but still not fixed.

    Peter

  7. This is a joke, they’re ramming this NEW MONEY IS HERE rubbish down our throats on the TV and everywhere online, yet we can’t access vital data that we use daily to keep our accounts running nicely.

    With Barclays, Natwest, Santander etc I can download 12 months data straight from the webpage and don’t have any of this rubbish.

    Paypal need to sort this out, it’s simply not acceptable and it’s also not acceptable they don’t know / won’t tell us a) what’s wrong and b) when it will be fixed. That makes it sounds like they don’t know to me.

    Noel

  8. I thought it must just be me, but I’ve been trying to get a download for my March summary for the last 10 days and it keeps failing. I thought it must be too big ( as I’ve had a busy month 🙂 ) Glad to know I’m not alone and will take it up with PayPal now.

  9. We stopped using the CSV exports years ago. Due to the amount of activity in our account it would take hours for them to be generated so instead I wrote a script using the TransactionSearch and GetTransactionDetails API calls. The API doesn’t deal with holds/chargebacks/etc very well but we don’t get many of them so it’s easy to manually fix by using the balance view.

    The new updates to PayPal are otherwise quite nice. The search is much better and it no longer takes 2-3 minutes to search by email.

  10. Used these reports for daily reconciliation for years, then started getting issues a few months ago, like everyone else it seems.

    I stumbled across:

    Reports > Financial Summaries > Monthly Sales

    and get all the same information there and download from there.

    Lee

  11. Done a download yesterday for the last 12 months transactions, took a while but I had an email this morning that it was ready to download. Downloaded it and it looks fine. Normally It’s something I only do once a year for the accounts. occasionally I may do the odd monthly download.

  12. Yes been trying for 2 weeks, different date blocks. Now promised the details by support 2 days ago but not received. Rubbish!

  13. I have called and they have a work around that seems to work for 90 days of transactions.
    Go to the Activity Tab,
    Then Statements (on the left)
    click report finder.
    Then transaction finder.
    Put your dates in.
    Leave transaction type as all.
    Then after it shows up, click download to CSV.

    It should be enough to get us through the tax year and appears enough detail for those with VAT returns to do also.
    Good Luck!

  14. Our account manager stated that it was because so many companies were requesting the reports for financial year end. Well blow me down, as far as I remember the 31st March happens every year – PayPal should put on extra storage/processing power, to deal with it. Pathetic planning.

  15. Took about 60 hours to process, but they are slowly generating them again now. Might be worth requesting again, but maybe change the dates slightly not to confuse the system.

  16. Still not working for me. I’ve been trying all weekend and have a pile of ‘Log unavailable for download’ emails….

    Into the 8th week of it not working now…

  17. Mine failed after around 60 hours, then I was told by Paypal to use the transaction finder in reporting, worked straight away and gave me more or less the same details.

  18. Just had an update from Paypal:

    Thank you for the update and I’m sorry that this is still happening. Our teams are still looking to resolve this issue. We are finding that some customers are finding success with requesting downloads in increments of 90 days or less. Some users that use Microsoft Edge are also having successful downloads.

    Sounds suitably vague to me….. :/

  19. Same problem for us for a few months now.

    A few days is too long for a financial company of this size to not have transaction history working. A few months is just utterly ridiculous.

    I mean, surely they have staff on hand to deal with this sort of problem? What’s holding them back exactly?!

  20. Hold the phone!!!

    Just put in another request to replace yesterdays failed ones, and it completed within 5 minutes for 3 months of data!

    Well done Paypal, its only taken you 8 weeks to fix it……

    Best go submit last quarters VAT return then eh? The next one is due in a few days…..

  21. For those of you selling internationally how do you separate out refunds made during a VAT quarter by country? Having looked at the PayPal reports for both All Activity and Balance Affecting Payments there doesn’t seem to be an address or country specified in the refund entries when filtering the CSV import in Excel.

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