If you are a merchant selling goods or services online, we can bet that you use PayPal to accept payments. For the convenience and ease of use that PayPal offers, merchants can setup their shopping carts really quickly and get going. This makes PayPal one of the mostly widely accepted and used payment gateway in the world. Given that you are reading this post further, like every business you too want to find out as to how much you have been making every month.In the very core of every commercial entity lies this inherent idea to figure out the revenue, profit and loss for period cycles of time so that decisions can be taken to put forth or change the course of business practices. For those of us who sell using PayPal, thankfully there are ways to generate PayPal monthly statements so that we can keep track of things.

With the monthly statement in hand, following are the primary details that most of us look for:-

1. Total Sales Revenue
2. Fees paid to PayPal
3. Available balance
4. Refunds

In this blog post, I will show you 2 ways to generate your PayPal monthly statements:-

1. An easy but tradition approach
2. A super easy next generation approach

Traditional Approach towards getting a PayPal monthly statement

PayPal lets you easily view and download your PayPal monthly statement from its website, and here’s how you can do so:-

• Login to your PayPal Business account
• Navigate to My Account -> History -> Reports
• On the reports page, you will notice a number of reports categorized into 3 sections:- Summary reports, Dispute and chargeback reports, History and search.
• From the summary reports, click and select the link for Monthly financial summary. We’ll take the other reports for a spin in later posts.
• From the page that loads, notice a Month selection dropdown in the Report search criteria. Select the month for which you wish to view/download the report and hit View Report.
• This is a how your report would look like:-

Limitations of the traditional approach

• You can only generate a report for 31 days – what if you wanted to have a look at data for the past 50 days or 100 days or since any previous business milestone.
• The report only provides high level numbers with no details whatsoever.
• It is time consuming – if you clock it, the whole process of generating a monthly PayPal report will take a few minutes!

The next generation, super easy way to generating PayPal monthly statements

 Now, we are going to see the all new way to do PayPal reporting. This will help you get all the details and highlights, along with clear trends and actionable indicators! Download PaySketch if you don’t have it already. Setting it up is real easy and then connect PaySketch to your PayPal account. You can also follow the detailed software manual if required.

• Open PaySketch and login with your PaySketch username/password.
• Navigate to the Reporting Dashboard . Select ‘Complete Financial Summary’ and a date range (a month or any other date range) for which you wish to view the statistics. Hit the Generate Report button and ta-da, you’re done!

PayPal Monthly Financial Summary Report

Additionally, you can navigate to the Sales Dashboard, select a date range and get a beautifully laid out PayPal sales report which graphically explains every bit about transaction details, sales, revenue and refunds for the selected date range.

So what do you see and get when you use PaySketch for PayPal reporting?

• Sales trends for the entire range of dates you’ve selected.
• Your Gross Sales and Net Sales revenue.
• PayPal Fees that you’ve paid for all of these sales.
• Amount and number of Refunds that you’ve processed.
• A distribution of sales by their statuses (for example – amount for 1 of the sales is in Held state, 1 in Refunded and the remaining 207 are in Completed payment states – as shown in the pie chart)
• Details for each of the transactions is just a click/second away.
• Ability to download the related sales transactions, along with trends and highlights.
• Rapid access to your PayPal data. We bet it won’t take you more than a few seconds on PaySketch to generate a similar statement.
• A neatly laid out graphical interface where the software does all the work so that you can focus on important numbers and attributes.
• Offline access to all your PayPal data.
• Ease of use.