Establish which record you need
Your accountant has asked for “PayPal for September”. Before downloading the first file you find, establish whether they need an account statement, detailed transactions or a record of one particular payment. Two PDFs do not necessarily contain the same information.
Start with a simple reply: “Do you need a monthly statement, a transaction export to import, or payment details? For which account and period?” This defines an output whose completeness you can then check.
Statements and exports answer different questions
PayPal describes monthly and custom statements as reports showing balances and activity that affects the balance over a selected period. It also says they do not include all pending transactions. A statement is therefore not a general list of absolutely everything you have ever entered in the account.
PayPal statement documentation →
Activity Download is a different report: it provides detailed transaction data for a selected range in various formats. PayPal distinguishes fields including status, currency, amount and transaction ID.
Activity Download documentation →
Choose the report to suit the question. A statement may be needed to compare the monthly balance; your accountant may require a CSV to process individual entries. Confirm the choice rather than treating one output as a substitute for the other.
Record the scope when downloading
In the correct account’s reports, select the required output type, start and end dates, and agreed format. Available controls and history can vary by account and market; if the option you need is missing, consult the help for your PayPal account or ask the account owner.
Once the file is ready, open it and check the period, currencies and report type. If the export arrives as a package of several files, check every part. Keep the original files; write notes in a separate list.
One payment does not cover the whole month
In a hypothetical example, Zuzana needs the September transactions from the company’s PayPal account. Instead, she downloads only the details of the latest payment. These may help with a particular purchase, but they do not fulfil the request for the month.
Zuzana therefore confirms the required export with the accountant and creates it for the entire agreed range. Alongside the file, she records “company account A, September, Activity Download, CSV”. If the document contains several currencies, she retains them as the service shows them, without doing her own conversion.
Also ask the supplier for a missing purchase record
A payment report is not automatically an invoice for the service or goods purchased. If the accountant needs the supplier’s document, request it separately and link it to the payment using a known identifier or order.
Add a handover note such as: “Attached is the September export from the company’s PayPal account in the agreed format. The invoice for the marked purchase is still missing and has been requested from the supplier.” The recipient then knows what the file contains and which question it does not yet answer.