Can not categorize PayPal transactions

Hello, sfaust. 

I'm sorry to hear that you're experiencing difficulty with QuickBooks Online (QBO) and cannot view transaction details or modify the type of product or service. I can understand how frustrating this must be for you, and I would like to help in any way I can.  

To ensure that your products are being recognized correctly and not coming in as a 'PayPal Item,' it is essential to check your PayPal mapping and ensure it is correctly set up. Here are the detailed steps you can follow: 
 

1. Click the Transactions and select App transaction.
2. Tap the Paypal setting, and check the mapping if it's tagged as Paypal Item under the "Products & Services" section.

With regards to the transaction details are not showing up. Typically, Sales receipts will capture line-level information that can be retrieved often depending on how PayPal has been used in each context.

Let's examine the details of the PayPal transaction to ensure it is correctly recorded in QuickBooks Online. We will verify that the transaction amount, date, payee, and relevant notes are accurately reflected in QuickBooks. If any of this information needs to be corrected or added, we may need to disconnect and reconnect your PayPal app to ensure that QuickBooks imports the transaction correctly. By doing this, we can avoid discrepancies in your financial records and ensure that your accounting is current. 

I've attached a link you can use to view the frequently asked questions about Connect to PayPal: Connect to PayPal FAQ. 

Please leave a comment below if you have any other questions or concerns with PayPal in QuickBooks. I'm more than happy to answer them. Have a wonderful day.

I'm sorry that's not really helpful and not really working right it doesn't seem.  I go to Transactions->App Transactions and I see apps for amazon business, ebay, shopify, amazon seller central, and square, no PayPal (I would guess because it's already connected).

I go under 'Apps->Overview' and I see the connect to PayPal app as the only one listed.  If I click 'launch' it says 'We're sorry, we can't find the page you requested.'  If I just select the app it says 'Your app is connected.  If your app has any connection issues, we'll let you know.'  If I click the dropdown and go to settings it just takes me to my bank transactions page which is where I am having the issue.

None of the above seems to help or give me any indication of why the issue is happening or how to fix it.  I have also not changed any of this for a long time so this is something new on your side that is causing an issue.

Also I guess we could try disconnect/reconnect PayPal but it's not really the PayPal import that is the issue as far as I can tell, it's the trying to categorize them once they are imported.

Just checked back and 9/8 was the last transaction I was able to successfully categorize, so it's been a full 2 months with no real answer from support. 

Tried disconnect/reconnect of the PayPal app, same issue.

Thanks for a quick response, @sfaust.

I know this isn't a usual situation you encounter while importing your PayPal transactions to QBO. On top of that, we appreciate you for performing the steps my colleague provided. Let me share information and direct you to the best possible help.

Currently, an investigation (INV-94136) about PayPal being unable to categorize transactions is ongoing. With that in mind, I recommend contacting our support to add you to the notification lists as one of the affected users. Rest assured our product experts are doing their best to resolve this issue. 

Moreover, their tools are equipped to pull up your account in a safe environment and can also look for the root cause of it and fix it. Once an update is available, our team will send it to you through email.

Here's how to contact support:

1. On the right corner, select the (?) Help icon.
2. Click Contact Us.
3. Enter a brief description of the issue. Then, tick Continue.
4. Select either Chat and start a conversation or a Callback we'll save your spot in line and call you back.

You can also log in through the web and contact support, you can read this article: QuickBooks Online Support.

Additionally, I'll share this article to help you create rules if you want to automatically categorize your PayPal transactions: Set up bank rules to categorize online banking transactions in QuickBooks Online.

For additional queries about PayPal or bank transaction categorization, reply to this post. I'll be willing to assist you. Have a good day.

Yes this is what support has said.  I'm on that investigation.  The investigation (or possibly 2 investigations I don't remember) has been ongoing for 2 MONTHS!  Meanwhile I'm not able to categorize my transactions.  

This is basically 'We are working on it, we'll let you know when we have something.'  Which is a frustrating answer to get for 2 months straight on a critical function.

Using automatically assign is also good but it applies to the whole transaction.  The part I usually need to modify is the item itself.  I have not found a way to set a rule to make a line item on a sales receipt be a particular product or service.  If that is possible that would be awesome but from my understanding it's not.  I also have certain cases where multiple items are in a single transaction and may go to different areas so that doesn't work there either.

Hello, @sfaust.

QuickBooks Online doesn't have the option to make a rule for the line item on the sales receipt. You can only set rules for bank transactions for moving in or out. However, the only option is to do it manually.

I suggest that we provide feedback to our developers, requesting the addition of the option to create rules for adding a line in the sales receipt. This would enhance the capabilities of QuickBooks Online. Here's how:

1. Go to the Gear icon, then select Feedback.
2. Type in your comments or product suggestions.
3. Click Next to submit.

Furthermore, check this out in case you want to personalize your sales forms: Customize invoices, estimates, and sales receipts in QuickBooks Online.

If you have any additional concerns besides sales receipts, please post them here in the community.

Ok I sent that through feedback, but that still doesn't address the issue here.  

I also just got the email for this week and unsurprisingly it says it's not fixed. It also says this:

We have asked Engineers to research the issue of seeing Attachments disappear once PayPal transactions are categorized. We hope to have an update soon, thank you for your patience.

That's not really the issue, or it's a poor description.  I would like to make sure it's actually being looked at.  How do I do that?

Thank you for getting back to the thread. Know that this is not the experience we want you to have while using the service.

To ensure that you are included in the list of affected users, it is still best to connect with our QuickBooks Online Support Team. They have the necessary tools to access your accounts securely and check and confirm your enlistment status. They are also the best person to provide you with the most up-to-date information regarding the ongoing INV's. Since we cannot provide this information here on the QuickBooks Community forum.

We appreciate your patience and understanding in this matter. Please let me know if there's anything else I can assist you with. Don't hesitate to post here again if you also have further QuickBooks-related concerns. We are available 24/7 to lend a hand with each of your queries. Stay safe!

Understood which is why I started with online support.  All they have been able to give me for 2 months though is 'we're working on it, thanks for your patience'.  With no success there I was hoping maybe a community member would have encountered the same thing and have a workaround of some sort at least.  Unfortunately that doesn't seem to be the case and official support here only has the same answer.

Just came across this thread and am having the exact same issue as you!  It's been going on for about two months now for me same as you.

Hopefully, the OB Online Support Team will get this resolved soon.

Yeah that would be great.  So far I'm not impressed by the response and I have several hundred transactions waiting to be categorized.  They say they are working on it and I hope that's true but I haven't seen anything really change.

It's fixed!!  Finally!  It seems to have changed the system just a bit as I now have to do the previous steps and then it wants me to match the transaction to the sales receipt it just created so that's mildly annoying but not a big deal.  Now to process 245 transactions that have been waiting...

It did also give me some weird error with taxes the first time I tried to categorize one but I cancelled and tried again and it worked so I think that was some temporary issue.

Is it really fixed though? I'm having the same problem and was told after a couple hours on a support call that I was on a "list" to be notified of every step in the process to fix this known issue and it would be 24-48 hours. It's been a week or so and nothing yet.

When I try to assign a category to a Sales Receipt for a paypal transaction, it already has a preassigned one that Intuit made up called Paypal sales. That does me no good, I need to categorize transactions by donations, payment for services, etc. There's no way to change the default account..

When I select "Categorization History" at the bottom, which one chat person helpfully told me to do, another window comes up. At the bottom of the screen is a green button that says "Assign Category" so I click that, and in big red letters a box comes up that says "Choose category to assign." Of course there's no option to choose anything. 

I just converted this client to Quickbooks Online and so far I've spent more hours on support calls than I did in years on QB Desktop. I'm just very very frustrated with all the glitches.

I hear you.  For me it is fixed as I can categorize my transactions and change the item category away from the 'PayPal' Item thing via going to details and then changing it.  It does work although they changed it a bit from how I had been doing it before, which is ok as long as it works as far as I'm concerned.  

Overall I'm with you, though.  I've been pretty frustrated with Intuit in general lately.  This was several months of not being able to do what I need to do in the program that I'm paying for and without any real help from support.  There are several other minor things that feel like bugs to me but aren't major (I get an 'are you sure you want to change the amount by $0' dialog every time I press to accept a transaction even though I haven't actually changed the amount for example). 

Then nothing to do with QB but Intuit, I used Mint for years and recently they just pushed everything over to CreditKarma.  Again, not a big deal as I understand that in software things merge and change, but got my data over and figured out that there are several very key things missing in CK from Mint (i.e. you can't have a second home listed or ignore certain accounts from a bank you are connected to).  

Anyway, overall I've been pretty unimpressed with Intuit lately and am seriously thinking about looking at what else is out there.

I find when I get "Sales Receipts" from PAYPAL that I cannot classify those sales into the correct category -- for instance in our case  since we are a non profit -- ticket sales or individual donations, etc.  So only work around O have found is to enter journal entries moving funds from paypal sales to  the correct categorized sale category.

There must be a better way!!!

It would be a wise move to create a journal entry, @SethNewDirections Cello in order to correctly categorize those sales in PayPal while utilizing QuickBooks Online. I've got some steps to help you how.

To create a Journal entry, here's how:

1. Select the + New button.
2. Click Journal entry.
3. On the first line, select an account from the Account field. Depending on if you need to debit or credit the account, enter the amount in the correct column.
4. On the next line, select the other account you're moving money to or from. Depending on if you entered a debit or credit on the first line, enter the same amount in the opposite column.
5. Check the amounts - you should have the same amount in the Credit column on one line and the Debit column on the other. This means the accounts are in balance.
6. Enter information in the memo section so you know why you made the journal entry.
7. Hit Save and new or Save and close.

With that, it's best to consult with your accounting professional first before making any changes to your accounts. However, if you don't have an accountant, you can find one here in our Resource Center. 

For more details about creating journal entries, check out Create journal entries in QuickBooks Online. 

Additionally, I've got you this helpful article for the steps that'll help review your transactions after uploading them: Categorize and match online bank transactions in QuickBooks Online.

Let us know if you have further questions about using PayPal. We'll be right here to help you at any time.

Sorry, another really unhelpful response from Intuit...  The question was essentially "I'm having to create a journal entry for every one of these, there has to be a better way to do this" and the 'answer' was "Here is how you create a journal entry, and you should talk to your accountant".  Thanks but that doesn't seem to help...

Seth do you have the PayPal app installed so that it brings them in automatically?  I have that and it brings them in, but then I have to go to details and then change the item type before accepting in order for it to categorize to the right place.  It's a step, but it's not really that bad, just a couple clicks and easier than doing journal entries for each one.  Hopefully that helps.

There should be a way to downvote at least Intuit responses as unhelpful...