I’ve been reading a few of the ideas here and it was last seen that PayPal would be looked into end of 2020, then again at end of 2021.
Is being able to sync PayPal payments going to be available any time soon? Regardless of Open Banking, they have a pretty comprehensive API and I think it would be a nice feature to put a bit of focus on since it’s used quite a lot.
At least being able to attach a PayPal account to a bank account so it can match up the PayPal transaction and the merchant so I don’t see lots of “PayPal” in the transaction list, but I see Spotify, or Discord, or Contabo.
Back in 2020 we were working with a specific 3rd party who provide our bank connections and we were pushing for PayPal integration. We later moved to a larger European wide provider who already worked with PayPal, so in late 2021 we were very hopeful we’d be able to get this enabled.
We fully switched over to that provider earlier this year, but it was clear their UK integration to Paypal was not ready for us to use and that remains the case.
With PayPal there are are at least three very different transactions:
Transactions that are passed through from credit card accounts
Transactions that are passed through from current accounts
Transactions that are made from a PayPal balance
We’ve been able to do a lot of development on (1) and we’ve improved how these PayPal transactions get matched to regular merchants on our system. These tend to come to us with descriptions like PAYPAL*SPOTIFY etc and we can often spot the merchant based on this. This isn’t always the case - but we’ve improved this a lot in the last year. These transactions make up a very high proportion of all the PayPal transactions we see.
For (2) however, it’s impossible for us to do anything with these as each current account provider provides just ‘PAYPAL DIRECT DEBIT’ for every transaction. No specific description or underlying PayPal transaction data is available, due to how DDs work (where money is just ‘pulled’ through as needed via a Direct Debit mandate).
We’d need to do some sort of integration with PayPal to get these current account transaction descriptions. However, this would not be simple because in order to avoid any double counting of spending, we’d somehow need to match the transaction at PayPal to the one in the current account. These transactions would arrive at different times, so we’d need to scan all accounts after each import to look for these matches.
For (3) we have no sight on these at all at the moment. We’d need the same integration as the current account transactions, but this time we’d not expect to match against any transaction in another account.
So for (2) and (3) we’d need additional functionality that we run only on PayPal each time we import transactions. We’d still love to do this extra integration and build this extra functionality - but it’s not on the immediate horizon I’m afraid.
This is a shame. It is possible on the Emma app, and shifting across this seems like the only downside to using Snoop vs. Emma. I’m pretty sure they just have a basic algorithm to match the paypal transactions against the current account ones (marked PAYPAL DIRECT DEBIT) based on time and amount, then hide the PAYPAL DIRECT DEBITS from the analytics. So this isn’t a special integration with Paypal. It would be really helpful because so many people pay for things online using Paypal to avoid sharing card details directly with too many services.
I need this too. I am reviewing whats available to move from MoneyDashboard which I have been using for years , but is now being discontinued. Maybe I should look at Emma.