PayPal History
The PayPal History Converter parses any of PayPal’s downloadable history formats and outputs the data in many other standard formats for use in your finance management application.
Compatibility
As well as being limited to a 2-year export, the PayPal history downloads are incomplete at best. The table below shows the features available in each format:
| CSV | TXT | QIF | IIF | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Currency | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ||
| Payee | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Timezone | ✓ | ✓ | |||
| Transaction ID | ✓ | ||||
| Memo | ✓ | ||||
| eBay Fee | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
Other things to note:
- CSV and TXT have a column for ID, but it is always empty.
- QIF only exports transactions that were made in USD. Other transactions are missing.
- IIF exports transactions for all currencies, but does not list the currency in the output. Amounts are in the currency of the transaction, making the format useless.
- PDF is limited by file size, but this is unlikely to be an issue for personal users.
Foreign Currencies
A typical transaction in anything other than your default currency may look something like this:
| Details | Currency | Amount |
|---|---|---|
| European Widgets | EUR | -10.00 |
| From British Pound | EUR | 10.00 |
| To Euro | GBP | -8.85 |
| Credit Card | GBP | 8.85 |
In this example, the purchase in Euros is redeemed by a credit card payment in Sterling, but there are 4 entries to illustrate this. By contrast, the converter calculates the exchange rate used for the transaction and includes it in the output. The converted output would therefore look like this:
| Details | Currency | Amount | Rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| European Widgets | EUR | -10.00 | 0.885 |
| Credit Card | GBP | 8.85 | 1.000 |
Output Formats
The following output formats are supported:
- OFX (v1 and v2)
- QIF
- CSV
OFX
OFX provides support for multiple currencies and accurate times.
QIF
QIF files do not support multiple currencies or accurate times, but the format is used by a number of finance management applications.
CSV
The output of the CSV format can be customised to support multiple finance management applications. The field order, date/time format and field separator can all be altered.