Paypal Open Banking is completely broken, support don't want to know

Hi FrustratedFromWales, Thank you for reaching out to the community to highlight the situation and also for providing a thorough explanation of what has happened. We've opened a new case as the Paypal fees not pulling through is something we're working on as a priority. We'll send you an email regarding the missing transactions and duplicates as this is a public forum and we'll need some screenshots to escalate that further.

Rest assured we shall work on a resolution for all the points you've mentioned.

Thank you for your reply.  I have replied to your email.

Interesting though that you say "as the Paypal fees not pulling through is something we're working on as a priority".  That does make it sound like it's still an ongoing issue despite having been told several times by myself that it's not fixed and having had my tickets closed as resolved ....

Hi FrustratedFromWales, Thanks for your reply. It is an ongoing issue with the fees not importing in on the Paypal connection on the new connection type. We'll be in contact via email on the case in response to your reply.

That's an interesting reply: "It is an ongoing issue with the fees not importing in on the Paypal connection on the new connection type" which begs the question which have my reports of this issue, multiple times, been closed and marked as resolved when it clearly is an ongoing issue.

As you are now addressing this as a priority - can you provide details on how high a priority it is and an expected fix date bearing in mind that I first reported this on February 24th ?  Can you now confirm that you are addressing this at a higher priority than before ?

Hi @FrustratedFromWales,

Currently, we don't have an exact timeline when it'll be fixed. Our engineers are working hard to get this resolved.

We will update this thread or contact you via email once an update is available.

In the meantime, you can visit our blog to know the latest update about QuickBooks. Here's the link: https://quickbooks.intuit.com/uk/blog/.

Please know that you're always welcome to swing by anytime if you have other questions or concerns. The Community is here for you. Thanks for posting and more power to your business.

"we don't have an exact timeline when it'll be fixed"

That doesn't sound to me like it's a very high priority and doesn't inspire me with confidence that it will be fixed given that I've been told that it's been fixed multiple times before (when it clearly hasn't) and the tickets has been closed with checking with me to see if my issue had actually been resolved.

In that case I will continue manually checking and adding the missing transactions and will continue invoicing for the hours of my time that this is taking.  Perhaps you can also remind your accounts team that the two invoices that I have submitted via QBO are now overdue and that reminders have been sent ?  I will be invoicing for the hours that I have wasted doing manually what QBO used to do automatically until this is resolved.

Hello,

Our Online Banking Team is diligently working with PayPal to get those fees downloaded in QuickBooks.

While they're investigating the main cause of the behavior, the ticket number INV-42500 is still in progress. 

For now, you can manually download those fees from PayPal. Then, upload them in to QuickBooks. This way, you won't miss any of you entries.

Let me show you how:

1. In QuickBooks Online, go to the Banking menu, then select the Banking tab.
2. Click PayPal.
3. Select the Update ▼, then File upload.
4. Click Browse and select the file you downloaded from your bank, then select Next.
5. From the QuickBooks account ▼ drop-down menu, select the account you want to upload the transactions into, then select Next.
6. Match the columns on the file with the banking fields in QuickBooks, then click Next.
7. When you’re ready, select Let's go.

Now that your transactions are in QuickBooks, it’s time to match and categorise the transactions. They’re not fully in your accounts until you’ve reviewed them.

I'll keep you posted once the issue is resolved. You can also contact our QuickBooks Online Support Team so they can add your account to the investigation. Doing this will allow you to receive updates via email.

Thank you and stay safe!

Thank you for your reply.

Just so that you aware, I am fully familiar with the process of uploading a CSV file into QBO containing the missing Paypal fee transactions.  I've been doing it every day since I reported this issue in February !

The issue is:

1. this should NOT even be necessary.  The move to Open Banking should not have been forced upon users until the QBO system was tested and working
2. it's the actual process of creating the spreadsheet of missing Paypal transactions that takes the time.  Sure, it's only 15 minutes every day but that's 1.75 hours a week spent doing something that I didn't used to have to do until this change was forced upon me
3. I'm trying to run my business, not compensate for QBO's self-inflicted failings ...

By the way, I have been in contact with the QBO Online Support team - numerous times !  Perhaps if you had read my original post you'd see exactly why I ended up posting this in the forum: no-one in support would take ownership, no-one would admit that there IS a problem, the problem was closed without consulting me, when it was re-opened it was randomly closed again.

So here's an excellent example of my usual morning routine with Quickbooks.

At the end of each day I log into QBO and run update to pull all of the transactions into it from Paypal (my other accounts don't update automatically any longer thanks to Open Banking not being supported / implemented).

This morning I logged into Paypal and went through my daily ritual of creating and printing out a report for the previous days transactions.  I then went through and put the Paypal fee transactions into a spreadsheet ready to import them into Quickbooks. If everything works properly (which is rare these days) the Paypal balance matches exactly the one for the Paypal account in Quickbooks.

This morning there was a discrepancy equal to the value of one of my payments.

So the next step is to go through the Paypal report line by line that I downloaded and printed out to compare the payments from customers until I find the missing one.  This is tedious and takes time.

In todays case I had two transactions from the same person but only ONE of those transactions is registered in Quickbooks but because you don't show the Paypal ID number anywhere I have no way of knowing which it is.

As a result I then had to create an entry in my spreadsheet for this missing payment so that I can import it into Quickbooks.

What appears to be happening is that Quickbooks reads the transactions from Paypal and see a duplicate customer name and disregards one payment. That would suggest that it's using a non-unique value (the customer name) as the criteria to determine if a transaction has been imported. What it SHOULD do is look at the Paypal transaction ID which IS unique.  This is a fundamental and schoolboy programming error !

Hello FrustratedFromWales, we received your email regarding the missing transactions and the screenshots you've sent,  thank you. We've replied to the email and are in the process of escalating this further with our banking team. Thank you for bringing this to our attention.

So, another day and another 15 minutes spent creating a spreadsheet of missing Paypal fee transactions to import into QBO because it still ignores them.  And then further time wasted trying to track down the reason why my Paypal account balance and the Quickbooks value fail to match ...

The reason ?

Two payments from the same person where QBO ignored the second one because - presumably - it checks on the customer name (assuming that it will be unique) rather than the Paypal transaction ID to see if the transaction has already been processed.

And another issue with the Paypal Open Banking "integration" ....

Again, my Paypal balance and QBO wouldn't balance so I've just spent 10 minutes comparing a print out of my Paypal transactions to those that QBO had imported to find the missing transaction.

In this case it wasn't a duplicate payment that was missed but a unique payment that QBO had completely missed.  Requesting QBO to update my Paypal account numerous times didn't get it to import it in so I had to manually create that payment as well as all of the Paypal fee payments that QBO is *still* missing (so much for this being a priority) ....

Hello FrustratedFromWales, We have escalated your case, as soon as we have an update will will email you to advise. Thanks 

So .... yet another 15 minutes spent looking for a Paypal transaction that QBO failed to import.

This time, it wasn't a duplicate - QBO just failed to import a transaction despite running update several times.

Why was something so bug ridden released, no, forced upon us ?  I've been reporting these issues to support since February and initially I was told that the problems were fixed (they clearly aren't).

The tactic now seems to have switched to "just tell the customer that we're working on it" but no progress is made and the same old bugs remain ...

Hello FrustratredfromWales, 

When you say have failed to import is it showing you any errors as to why it has not imported for?

We understand that you are frustrated having to CSV the transaction into your account, we can assure you our engineers are working on getting this PayPal issue resolved as quickly as they can, you have been added to the investigation and soon as there are any updates you will receive an email to inform you about this. 

No, it's not showing that there's a transaction missing.  If it did that would help.

The Paypal balance retrieved by QBO from Paypal often doesn't balance so I have to through up to 100 transactions looking for the missing one.  As you can imagine this is:

1.  tedious
2. a waste of my time as the old (pre-Open Banking system) worked perfectly without any issues

This may be high on the list of priorities for your engineers but words speak louder than actions.  I've been reporting this issue since February and it's been consistently:

1. denied that there's a problem
2. ignored for months
3. closed without checking

Do any of those actions suggest to you that it's been taken seriously and treated with urgency ?

It's only since I started posting in this forum that anything seems to be getting done.  And, to be honest, all I've had is words.  No actually progress has been made.  It's still broken ...

When csv the transactions into your account it will not change the balance of the account until it has a live connection with the bank. We know this is not ideal and it taking a lot longer than expected for our engineers to fix the issue but they are working on it and working with the banks to get the issue resolved. we take all our investigation seriously and some get resolved quicker than others due as it depends on what the engineers fine wrong and have to work through to get them sorted. 

As someone who develops software professionally I am aware of the processes involved in developing and debugging software.  It's what I do for a living ...

I'm also well aware of the processes that should be gone through before software is released - namely checking that it meets the requirements of the functional specification and of any test cases that were created in order to check that the software works.  If it doesn't then the code is not released unless the issue is a very minor one and can be quickly resolved shortly after release.

It would appear - given the bug ridden nature of the Open Banking implementation from QBO - that Intuit are not familar with the any of those concepts.

Failing to do what the previous system did, missing transactions, randomly duplicating old ones does not - in my book - count as software that's ready to be released.

So here's yet another bug in the QBO Paypal integration (and there's a lot) ....

On May 11th I had to manually create a transaction because QBO failed to import it.  And out of interest the missing payment also didn't appear in any of the twice daily updates that I do during the day over the last week.

And then tonight, as if by magic, the missing payment from May 11th (7 days ago) suddenly gets imported with the date from 7 days ago (May 11th) !

The money cleared into my account a week ago, it was not an eCheque payment (which can take a while) so there is no excuse of this one.  How could a payment that's over a week old suddenly appear ?

How was this integration ever allowed to be pushed out to customers ?

Thank you for sharing your experience, @FrustratedFromWales.

It’s great to know that these missing fees are now added to your account. Our Product Engineers are still working on the connection between PayPal and QuickBooks to keep these transactions updated. 

I suggest contacting our Phone Support Team, so you'll be added to the list of affected users and receive an email notification once we resolve the issue.

Here's how to contact the QuickBooks Online Customer Support team. Then, let them add you to Investigation No. 42500.

Let us know if there’s anything that you need. I’m always here to assist. Have a great rest of the day!

No, this is not a missing fee.

This is a missing customer transaction that I had to manually create a week ago which has now mysteriously turned up.  Perhaps the 20 or so other missing customer transactions that I've had to create since the end of February will randomly appear too ?

Or maybe the 1,000+ Paypal fee transactions that I've had to manually create will as well ?

Somehow I doubt it even though it's apparently a "priority" to resolve this.  Apart from sympathetic words "we're working on it", "it's a priority", "our engineers are looking at it" ZERO progress has been made on this since the end of February.

Actions speak louder than words, so far there has been NO action on this at all.

Providing the best experience with the product is what we aim for, FrustratedFromWales.

Our engineers are still working with PayPal to get those fees downloaded in QuickBooks Online (QBO). For now, we don't have a specific time frame for when is this going to be mitigated. Rest assured, this banking issue with the ticket number INV-42500 is being taken care of.

There's no need to manually create the Paypal fees, just use the WebConnect feature for the missing transactions. It allows you to manually add your banking data by downloading them on your bank's website and import to QBO. This way, you won't miss any of your entries.

You can choose one of these formats to upload:

• Comma-Separated Values (CSV)
• QuickBooks Online (QBO)

Then, match and categorise the downloaded transactions.

If you haven't contacted our Customer Support Team, please reach out to them to add you to the list of affected users. They'll also send you an email notification once there's an update of this one.

Here's how:

1. Click the Help icon on the top right. 
2. Tap the Contact Us button at the bottom. 
3. Enter a short description of your concern. 
4. Tick Continue. 
5. Choose Message an agent to connect with our support. 

I have a link here that provides you with articles about managing bank transactions: https://quickbooks.intuit.com/learn-support/banking/misc/02/uk-banking?label=QuickBooks%20Online.

We appreciate your patience in this matter. I'll also keep an eye on the issue and will get back to you if there's an update. 

Sigh ....

And here is a perfect example of what I was referring to: "Providing the best experience with the product is what we aim for", "our engineers are still working with Paypal", "we don't have a specific time frame", "this issue is being taken care of".  They are just words ....

If that's what you believe to be happening then you clearly haven't bothered to read any of my previous comments where I explain that I've reported this issue several times to support since February.

Here's a summary: I reported the missing Paypal fee transactions the first day I was forced to use Open Banking to connect to Paypal (end of February).  Support closed the issue.  I reported it again, I was told it was fixed.  Support closed the issue.  I reported it again saying it clearly wasn't fixed.  Nothing happened .... and then a month later support closed the issue.

So please don't patronise me by telling me to contact support.  Since posting publically in here (something I was reluctant to do) finally support at least acknowledge that there is an issue.

I suppose acknowledgement that there is an issue is a start.  But I would also like answers as to why such a bug ridden system was forced upon users without any apparent testing being done to identify potential issues.  The missing Paypal fee transactions were apparent the FIRST day that I was forced to use Open Banking and the missing fee transactions, random missing customer transactions, random duplicate transactions a week later etc are still apparent which I why I will continue to update this thread with my experiences.

If you'd also bothered to read the other posts that I'd written you'd appreciate that I'm NOT manually entering the 1,000+ missing Paypal fee transactions into the QBO interface.  I am creating a spreadsheet and doing a CSV import.  Whilst I could download the activity from Paypal it would actually take longer to remove all of the unwanted information from it than it takes to create a barebones CSV with just the transactions in it.  I've tried it both ways and since I have a business to run I do it the way that's fastest for me.

However since QBO turned off the link to my bank I do have to create those transactions manually because they don't offer a way of downloading my transactions so I'm now wasting around 1.5 hours a week doing stuff with QBO that used to take seconds to do before your botched Open Banking solution was forced upon me and other users.

As you put it "Providing the best experience with the product is what we aim for".  Seriously ?  If that's what you think then you need to re-read this entire thread from the start !

So this morning I spent 15 minutes trying to work out which of yesterday payments were missing so that my Paypal and QBO balances would match.

It turns out that the bug-ridden QBO / Paypal integration decided - despite multiple chances to update my Paypal account - to ignore not one but FOUR customer payments that I received yesterday as well as all of the Paypal fee transactions so that was yet another batch of missing transactions to be created.

Before anyone from QBO decides to post some trite "we take this very seriously" comment please READ all of the issues that I'm having with QBO and get someone in support to take this problem seriously and to RESOLVE it !