PayPal to Quicken
Do Any of These Apply to You?
- Do you use PayPal for your business and need to load your PayPal transactions into Quicken?
- Do you need more than 90 days worth of transactions?
- Do you need email addresses or other info from your PayPal transactions loaded into your Quicken register?
- Would you like to automatically split the PayPal transaction into income and expense categories?
MoneyThumb offers two alternatives for improved PayPal import
CSV2QIF – If you are importing PayPal transactions only once, then CSV2QIF is slightly simpler. It can perform the automatic generation of split transactions. QFX does not support splits or categories.
CSV2QFX – If you are merging with an existing Quicken account or intend to import PayPal transactions into Quicken on a regular basis and want to avoid duplicate transactions, then you should use CSV2QFX.
You can import an unlimited history of PayPal transactions into Quicken quickly and easily using either CSV2QIF or CSV2QFX. And you can control which information is loaded into the Quicken Payee and Memo fields. Additionally, CSV2QIF can automatically generate Quicken split transactions from the PayPal downloaded file.
PayPal to Quicken Tutorial
How to import PayPal into Quicken with CSV2QIF
1. Download your PayPal transactions to a CSV file on your computer,
If you are not familiar with that, the procedure for doing so is at the end of this page. Give the file a name such as paypal.csv.
2. Install and run CSV2QIF
3. Select the Convert menu, and browse to the downloaded PayPal file from the previous step.
4. Select the file, and then Select Open. This will run the CSV2QIF Convert, and create a QIF file, in this example called paypal.qif
5. Run the Quicken program.
6. Select File, then from the pull-down menu select File Import, and then QIF File… This will bring up a dialog window.
7. Select the following options in the dialog:
In the box for Location of QIF file, select Browse and browse to the QIF just created i.e. paypal.qif.
In the box for Quicken Account to import into, select the pull-down and select <All Accounts>. Selecting an individual account will not work. Ignore the warning about not being able to import checking, savings, or credit cards etc. The QIF files created by CSV2QIF contain the account name in a format that Quicken does read.
At the bottom of the dialog, select the Transactions check box, and unselect all the other check boxes.
8. Select Import to import the transactions into Quicken.
You will get various prompts from Quicken depending on whether the account already exists, and whether it is currently the active account. You may also be prompted to allow Quicken to create new categories. Confirm that you want to import the transactions
9. From the Quicken account list, select the account, i.e. paypal. The transactions imported from PayPal will be in a temporary register at the bottom of the screen.
10. Select Accept All (at the lower right) to accept all the imported transactions. Or select individual transaction to accept or delete.
Procedure to Create a PayPal CSV file
- Login into your PayPal account. Note that this procedure is written for the ‘new PayPal experience’ user interface on the PayPal web site, not the ‘classic’.
- Select from the top menu bar
- Select from the left menu, as seen below:
- Choose the Transaction type download type as either or . Balance Affecting Payments will include refunds and disputed payments in addition to Completed Payments.
- Select on the right side. When the report is reading, save the file on your computer, for example as paypal download.csv.
In our example the downloaded .csv file looks like this when viewed in Excel (there are many more columns to the right, which are not visible here)
How to import PayPal into Quicken with CSV2QFX
1. Download your PayPal transactions to a CSV file on your computer,
If you are not familiar with that, the procedure for doing so is at the end of this page. Give the file a name such as paypal.csv.
2. Install and run CSV2QFX
3. Select the Settings button. This brings up a dialog window with Quicken information.
4. Select Lookup (to the right of the FID input box), and this will bring up the Quicken list of financial institutions.
5. Type payapl into the Search String box. The only line remaining should be PayPal, so select that line.
6. Select OK twice to return to the main CSV2QFX screen. (You can leave the routing number blank; the account number is useful if you have more than one PayPal account and would be your PayPal login email.)
7, Select the File menu, then Open CSV File, and browse to the downloaded PayPal file, i.e. paypal.csv,
8. Select the file, and then select Open. This will run the CSV2QFX converter, and create a QFX file, in this example called paypal.qfx.
9. Run the Quicken program.
10. Select File, then from the pull-down menu select File Import, and then Web Connect File…
11. Browse to the QFX file just created (i.e. paypal.qfx) , select it, and select Open
OR you can combine steps 9-11 by using Windows Explorer, and simply double-clicking the QFX file.
Either method will bring up a Import Downloaded Transactions dialog:
12. Select the correct option – to create a new account called PayPal, or to link to an existing account.
If creating a new account, the account type should be Savings, although it does not make much difference.
13. Select Import, and the PayPal transactions will be read.
14. If your Quicken preference type for Downloaded Transactions is not set to Automatically add to registers then the transactions imported from PayPal will be in a temporary register at the bottom of the screen. In this case, select Accept All (at the lower right) to accept all the imported transactions. Or select individual transaction to accept or delete.
Procedure to Create a PayPal CSV file
- Login into your PayPal account. Note that this procedure is written for the ‘new PayPal experience’ user interface on the PayPal web site, not the ‘classic’.
- Select from the top menu bar
- Select from the left menu, as seen below:
- Choose the Transaction type download type as either or . Balance Affecting Payments will include refunds and disputed payments in addition to Completed Payments.
- Select on the right side. When the report is reading, save the file on your computer, for example as paypal download.csv.
In our example the downloaded .csv file looks like this when viewed in Excel (there are many more columns to the right, which are not visible here)
Automatically create splits for PayPal transactions
This feature in only available in CSV2QIF. QFX format does not support the ability to create categories.
1. Open the paypal.csv file with Excel or a text editor.
2. Change any column headers that should be split to “Split<QuickenCategory>”.
For example, to automatically split PayPal transactions so that they contain Gross as an Income Category, and Fee as an Expense Category, edit the column header from Gross to Split<Sales (Business)> and from Fee to Split<Discounts (Business)>.
3. Run CSV2QIF and it will generate transactions that are imported as splits by Quicken. Then follow the same procedure as above for CSV2QIF.
For more details see the CSV2QIF | help.
Fine-tuning PayPal field input
If you view the downloaded PayPal file in Excel, you can see that there are over 30 columns, some of which have pretty detailed information. The default for both CSV2QIF and CSV2QFX is to use the Name column for the Quicken Payee, and the From Email Address as the Quicken Memo (This default is because Name is an alternative for Payee, and Address is an alternative for Memo).
If you wish to have some other fields used for the conversion, then edit the paypal.csv file to rename the headers so the that first Payee or Name column is what you want to import for the Payee and the first Memo or Address column is what you want to import into the Quicken Memo.
See the appendix in the appropriate converter help file for more details on the column headers and fields.
Procedure to Download PayPal Transactions to a CSV file
1. Log into your PayPal account at www.paypal.com from your web browser.
2. Select “My Account” from the top menu. This will bring up list of recent transactions.
3. Select “View all of my transactions” (this is just above the recent transactions, on the right hand side)
4. Select a date range for the transactions you want to import at the top of the screen.
PayPal has a limit of two years for a single download. If you need more than two years you will have to do multiple downloads. You can either combine them in Excel, or import them individually.
5. Select “Download CSV”, (which is above the transactions on the right hand side).
6. Your browser will open a popup window prompting you to save or open the file – save the file to a folder or your desktop and give it a useful name such as paypal.csv.