[GNC] How to work with paypal transaction reports?

[Alan]

I have a lot of experience with PayPal transaction import with Quicken, and what
you're trying to do is impossible. Unless if PayPal radically changed their
system over the past year, all you can get that would be compatible with a
financial program, would be QIF format. QIF has no dupe detection, and no way to
do anything with a transaction record that shows the change in status. However,
I've never seen a status field from PayPal. QIF format also brings along a
useless "transaction fee" field (always zero) within a split on every
transaction.

If you re-import the same transactions, you'll end up with uncontrollable dupes
that will have to be deleted one at a time (since there is no bulk delete
command within gnucash). The best you can do is just import the transactions
from PayPal and manually correct the bogus splits, and the transaction dates
(which are always wrong). Should be easy to reconcile, since every completed
transaction should result in a zero balance.