Paypal transactions

[Marcin Tomasz Małecki]

I do 1 transaction with 2 sub-transaction:
1) credit card to pay-pal - as you transfer money from credit card account to 
pay pal account
2) pay-pal to expense account - as you transfer money from pay-pal to your 
seller
so in effect you will have 2 pay-pal entries with one transaction and one entry 
with other account

-- 
Marcin T Małecki 
Linux user #459629 
http://maleccy.net
On Sunday 16 November 2008 17:01:10 jgombos wrote:
> There are a couple ways to account for paypal purchases.  I'd like to know
> what folks prefer, and what the accounting lawyers consider proper.
>
> At the moment, I start in the paypal register (which I created as an
> "asset" account; is that correct?).
>
> I create a transaction with an "increase" of zero.  Then I split the
> transaction, and enter a line to transfer to an expense account, and
> another line to transfer from the liabilities account (credit card). 
> There's less clutter with this approach, because there is one line per
> purchase in the paypal register.  However, every transaction has a total
> value of zero, so when the splits are all collapsed it's not convenient to
> see the size of transactions.  Another shortcoming is that from the
> standpoint of the credit card account, it almost gives the appearance that
> the purchase was direct. Paypal shows up in the splits, but the amount
> going to paypal shows up as zero, which isn't exactly true.
>
> Alternatively, a transfer from the credit card to the paypal acct could be
> one transaction, and a completely separate transaction going from paypal to
> the expense account.  One of the problems here is that when looking at the
> liability account register, the expense account involved is totally masked.
> It requires a jump to the paypal account to see what the expense was.