How do you setup Invoicing and Payments for sales on eBay?

Jeannie78

I'm struggling to accurately record eBay sales in Quicken. My current process:

1. Create an invoice for the customer (Order Total as income, Transaction fee and shipping as expenses)
2. Sync accounts after the sale, showing eBay's deposit (net amount after fees)
3. Unable to link the eBay deposit to the invoice as a payment

Issues:

• Can't select the eBay deposit when receiving a payment (only customer and deposit account options)
• Receiving the payment creates a duplicate entry (invoice payment and eBay deposit)

Has anyone found an efficient workaround to manage eBay sales in Quicken without duplicate entries or unreconciled invoices?

I'm using Quicken Classic Canada

Thanks

UKR

The fly in the ointment is that Quicken Invoice processing is an old fashioned program. It's been designed before the Internet and online businesses were even thought of:

• One creates a new customer invoice and mails it to the customer
• One waits for the customer to mail a check and records a New Customer Payment transaction
  This transaction records as a transfer to the checking account where you deposit the check
  The customer invoice is marked as paid (if the full amount was received)
• Other transactions like refund, credit, finance charge, etc. are entered as needed.

Nowadays, with direct deposit to checking accounts available or customers making payments thru PayPal, etc., you need to work around these new functions. IMHO, you should do this:

• Set the account(s) receiving customer payments to NOT automatically accept downloaded transactions into the registers.
• Download transactions.
• Review downloaded transactions, one by one.
• For each new deposit (customer payment) transaction go to the Invoices account and record New Customer Payment transaction.
• Switch back to the checking or PayPal account. Match the downloaded transaction to the payment transaction now appearing in the register. Accept it.
• Lather, rinse, repeat for all other unaccepted downloaded transactions.

This works well if the deposited amount is equal to the invoice amount owed. But, how does one record the amount deducted by PayPal? For example, customer owes $100 and paid $100 to PayPal. PayPal takes $5 off the top and deposits $95 to you. If you tell Quicken the customer only paid $95, the invoice won't be marked as fully paid.
I haven't quite figured out myself, how to match $95 received to $100 owed and correctly and easily record $5 as PayPal Fee.

Anybody got any ideas? I'm scraping the bottom of the barrel here.