If PayPal debits any of my (bank) account or credit cards, the transaction shows a SEPA reference, as almost all bank transactions nowadays show a SEPA reference. Now have you ever wondered, what you can do with the SEPA reference?
- If the transaction is a valid PayPal transaction, the 3rd constituent simply says “PAYPAL”.
- The middle constituent looks like “PP.9999.PP”, it also gets repeated within the further reference fields. I researched all my PayPal transactions on my bank accounts, and I found only a few different occurrence, and if fact each 9999 is actually an id for a particular bank account of mine, that PayPal may debit.
- For the 1st constituent I have no explanation, and when I called their hotline, they left that unexplained, whereas I got my reasoning regarding the middle constituent confirmed.
There is no particular identifying property in your bank transaction, that you can relate to your PayPal transactions. I find that rather, rather poor on PayPal’ side. They should support you there. Nowadays you can only guess from the amounts in your home currency, and of course most of the time the transaction will quote a name that may sound familiar to you. But sometimes they quote yet another handling agent, that may mean nothing to you.
This is how I deal with new PayPal transactions.
Whenever I purchase something over the Internet through PayPal, I immediately store the involved vouchers in disk folders related to the involved bank account. I create a PDF from the PayPal statement resp. the concerned transaction, that PDF has “paypal” in its filename close to the extension “.pdf”.
If an e-mail message from PayPal related to a transaction shows up, I put a record on my diary. “procmail” creates log entries for all incoming messages, I got software to format that in a way that I like for my diary.
The supplier also (usually) sends me a confirmation message mentioning the debiting through PayPal. I put that record on my diary as well.
These two should be in close vicinity in my diary. Will theses records explain me enough details of the story? If not, I will add a few words.
Once a PayPal transaction appears on my bank account statement, the involved vouchers get renamed to match the transaction number, and the transaction gets sufficient details added – including an accounting category resp. a draft plan number.
The SEPA Direct Debit (“SDD”) transactions comes with a creditor id and mandate reference. I compare the used creditor id to the previous PayPal transaction’s creditor id. Your PayPal profile shows the SDD mandate reference for each account registered. They match the SDD mandate reference shown in the bank account transaction
Have I always been that smart and organised? Of course not. Smartness comes from real life experience, from suffering and mostly from lessons learned.
Do you think, I am overdoing? You do it differently? Amongst the things I do – is there anything unnecessary? Tell me!
Leave a Reply