Paypal US foreign charges

twoaussie

I have set up my US Paypal account as a $US account but when I download transactions, any foreign currency amount is downloaded as a US$ amount (it does not pick up $US translated amount rather the local currency amount) in the account. The balance on the account is correct so it seems to make an opening balance adjustment to get the balance correct. How can I fix this other than make this a manual update account

Quicken_Tyka

Hello @twoaussie

Thank you for taking the time to visit the Community to report this issue, although I apologize that you have not received a response.

Are you able to capture a screenshot of the issues you are seeing? 

The more information you can provide regarding this issue will help the Community to better understand and assist.

Thank you,

-Quicken Tyka 

twoaussie

In the screenshot attached you can see a number of examples of the issue. The downloaded transactions have the blue dot and the transaction without the blue dot are the correct transaction amounts in USD manually entered. The quicken download, for example, reports a $350.00 receipt in the register on 3/3/2021 which was $A350.00 which translates to $US263.75 which is the correct value to ensure the correct balance on the account. The transaction on the 26th of GBP 22.94 is also downloaded into the register at the local currency amount, not the translated US$ amount of $US33.73. Also, it seems that transactions through PayPal to a linked credit card bring across the debit eg., the transaction for $46.13 on 27/02/2021 but not the credit out of the account to the credit card so the balance is incorrectly impacted

twoaussie

I have also added the screenshot as an attachment

Quicken Anja

Hello @twoaussie,

Thank you for reaching out to the Community to tell us about your issue, though I apologize that you are experiencing this.

The transaction information being downloaded is sent directly from the financial institution's servers which Quicken does not have control over. You can try dragging and dropping the downloaded transaction to the manual entry to match the transactions. However, you will likely still need to correct the transaction amount to the correct USD amount.

Unfortunately, Quicken for Mac does not currently have the ability for currency conversion when transactions are downloaded in a foreign currency amount. Therefore, I'd like to refer you to this active Idea post regarding this topic instead which is currently marked as Planned. If you would like to be notified of updates on this feature as they become available, you can go ahead and bookmark the thread by clicking the yellow star on the top-right corner.

Alternatively, if this is not quite what you are looking for and wish to submit your own request for something more specific, then you can create your own idea post and add your vote. 

Our Development and Product teams frequently use our idea posts in order to improve Quicken and implement new features requested by customers. 

I hope this helps!

Chris_QPW

Personally I'm still trying to wrap my head around what was said/shown.

Quicken can't do the currency conversion.  The exchange rates are changing all the time.  What it might be at the time of the purchase isn't what it will be when it is downloaded, and in fact even if you had the exact time it wouldn't work because different financial institutions will give you a different exchange rate.

As such the USD amount would have to come from PayPal.  So the part of the question that is confusing me is do you believe that PayPal is making such information available, but Intuit (which provides the Quicken Connect service) is picking it up wrong?  Or do you expect Quicken to be able to do the exchange, which as I said is impossible.

twoaussie

It seems that Intuit does not have a developed file transfer protocol with Paypal, but rather is doing a screen scrape of the data. This is my guess why there is a problem. As such, they are picking up the foreign currency amounts in the screen scrape. Paypal provides their US translation in their account activity reports on their website as the account is a US$ account and all foreign transactions are recorded in US$'s. Quicken does not need to translate anything, as Paypal does this and keeps a running US$ balance. What is not happening and needs to happen to make this work, is Paypal would need to make available to Quicken users a dedicated developed OFX file with the US$ amounts that the Quicken Connect process can have access to and bring across. How can I influence this to happen?

twoaussie

There is an option to download a QIF file from the Paypal site which I just found. I am seeing if this will be allowed by Quicken to be imported

Chris_QPW

To answer your questions above.  "Quicken Connect" (Express Web Connect) is the term they use for Intuit's server going to the financial institution's website and getting the data.  What isn't stated because isn't any kind of standard, is HOW it is going to get the data.  The "method" is an "agreement" and varies between different financial institutions.  So it is guesswork on exactly how they are getting that data, but I would suspect that they are pretty much getting it in the form that the user gets in the CSV format.  So most likely the information is there.

But the key here is I don't think Intuit "thinks" about currency exchange and such because they don't support foreign (non US/Canadian) financial institutions.  So as long as they picked up a column that works for that, most likely their have never even thought about doing it differently.

I ran into the same kind of problem with downloading transactions for a business account in the past.  As in they would download transaction amounts that were fine if you were just doing "user transactions", but if you had payments with splits and such you would end up with a "gross amount" instead of the net amount you need.

So to get this changed you would need to talk to Quicken support, which in turn would have to talk to Intuit, since you can't go directly to them.  In this rare case I don't think talking to PayPal would do any good because of the fact that they are probably already providing the data, but Intuit is just grabbing the wrong data.

On the QIF file. If you are using the new Quicken Mac you can't import it, they don't have support for downloading transactions through QIF.  The QIF import is only for coming from another financial program and only is used to create an account.

You would have to convert it to a QFX file.  What's more depending on the transaction that might be a problem.  For transactions like a customer purchase, they are in fact "split transactions, for the payment and fees".  QFX format doesn't support split transactions, but the QIF format does.  So the Quicken Connect (which uses QFX format for the transfer into Quicken ) gets these details as individual transactions.   Where as the QIF file puts these in as a split.  So whatever does the QIF to QFX conversion would have to take that into account.

twoaussie

I tried to convert the QIF file to OFX, no luck changing the file extension and of course, no luck importing a QIF file to Mac. Is there a file converter programme for MAC that works?

Chris_QPW

twoaussie said:

I tried to convert the QIF file to OFX, no luck changing the file extension and of course, no luck importing a QIF file to Mac. Is there a file converter programme for MAC that works?

If you search for QIF2QFX I’m sure you will find one.  I can’t recommend which would work in this case though.

twoaussie

My workaround for this challenge turns out to be simple but manual. I let Quicken for Mac import the amount it scrapes from Paypal. When I reconcile the account, usually weekly, I have the Paypal account open on my screen at the activity page and I change the imported amount to the USD amount as reported on the Paypal activity page. Then once any non-USD amounts are adjusted, I finalise the reconciliation in Quicken and it works. I add the LC amount in the memo notes so I can see that the transaction was a non-USD txn converted to USD by Paypal. Manual and it would be much easier if Quicken and Paypal could agree on a working relationship for Paypal accounts, but it is not a lot of work when I am dealing with less than 20 txns per month.