PayPal
×
Papercrane
Where is your PayPal money right now?
PayPal shows one balance, but some of it is withheld, some sits in open disputes, and some is on its way to the bank. Papercrane joins PayPal with QuickBooks, Stripe, and your store, then builds a live hosted dashboard of the answer.
Connect by pasting two keys from your PayPal account. Free to connect and ask. Paid plans start when you publish a dashboard. See pricing
Three numbers that refuse to match
The report that moved again
The monthly report you used is somewhere new, the help page points at a link your screen doesn't have, and the export works when it feels like it. Finding last month takes longer than reading it.
Store, PayPal, bank: pick a total
Fees come out before the money moves, refunds fold into later transfers, and several days batch into one deposit. Your store, your PayPal activity, and your bank statement are three versions of the same month.
Visible is not spendable
Part of the balance is withheld or tied up in a dispute, and a transfer takes one to three business days to land. The number on PayPal's home screen is not the number you can use today.
The money in flight
One balance number covers four different situations. Papercrane splits it the way you actually spend it: available, withheld, disputed, and in transit, each with a date attached.
Where the money is
Built from your account's own numbers in one conversation, and it stays live.
Questions a balance can't answer
How much is on its way to the bank right now, and what day does it land?
What was my effective PayPal rate last month, cross border sales and currency conversion included?
Per $100 of sales, what do PayPal, Stripe, and Square each keep?
Which store orders have no matching PayPal payment?
How much is sitting in open disputes, and is that number growing?
Which PayPal invoices are still unpaid, and how many days overdue?
Every answer comes back as a chart on a hosted dashboard you can leave open, not a total you copy into a spreadsheet.
1. Paste two keys from your PayPal account
2. Ask a question
3. Papercrane's agent plans the queries, joins the sources, and builds a hosted dashboard
4. It stays live, and errors route back to the agent
Read access through keys you create and can revoke on PayPal's side any time. Nothing changes in your checkout.
Getting an answer out of PayPal, three ways
| The job | PayPal's own reports | Exports and a spreadsheet | PayPal + Papercrane |
|---|---|---|---|
| Last month's sales with fees taken out | Activity filters, totals by hand, hope the layout didn't change | Export the CSV, sum the fee column, mind the currencies | Ask once, the chart stays current |
| Available versus withheld versus disputed | One balance figure per currency on the home screen | Not in the export | One tile: available, withheld, disputed, in transit |
| Squaring PayPal against the store and the bank | Not its job | Three files side by side, one evening a month | Joins WooCommerce and QuickBooks, flags what doesn't match |
| What each processor takes per $100 | Its own fees only | A second and third export | PayPal, Stripe, and Square on one chart |
| When a number looks wrong | Re run the report | Hunt for the broken formula | Errors route back to the agent, which repairs the dashboard |
What people build first
The overseas fee audit
A WooCommerce store shipping to Europe asked what PayPal really costs. Counting the currency conversion, overseas orders were paying close to 8 percent, a number the owner had never seen in one place before.
The treasurer's Sunday
A nonprofit's donations arrive through PayPal and its bills clear the bank. One dashboard now lines PayPal activity up against QuickBooks deposits, and the board reads it monthly without a spreadsheet attached.
Two accounts, one view
A seller runs separate PayPal accounts for retail and wholesale. Both are connected and addressed by name, so one question comes back with both answers side by side.
When you don't need us
If PayPal is your only channel and the monthly statement answers your questions, you don't need us; the statement is free. If the one job is posting every PayPal transaction into QuickBooks or Xero as bookkeeping entries, a sync tool like Synder is built for exactly that and we are not: Papercrane reads your books, it does not write them. Papercrane is worth paying for when the answer spans PayPal and at least one other system, or when it needs to live on a dashboard your team or your accountant can watch.
Questions people ask us
Most people connect QuickBooks next, for the bank side of the reconciliation, then Stripe or Square to compare what getting paid costs.
Paste in your two keys, ask where the money is, and get back a dashboard that stays live after the tab closes.
Free to connect and ask. Paid plans start at publishing. See pricing
Papercrane
Integrations: