PayPal activity to dashboard
Your PayPal activity download, read properly.
Download the activity report from PayPal, drop the CSV here, and the dashboard reads Gross, Fee and Net the way PayPal means them: fees arrive as negatives, refunds and withdrawals as negative Gross, and the running Balance is treated as a balance rather than something to add up. The split Date and Time columns are recombined for the trend chart.
Prefer the full explorer? Open the app, or start from the generic dashboard builder.
The activity report is a ledger, not a sales list
People open a PayPal CSV expecting a list of sales and find a general ledger. Payments received, refunds issued, currency conversions, withdrawals to a bank account and the occasional fee reversal all share one file, all with a Type column that decides what the row means. Sum Gross across the lot and you get a number with no interpretation at all, because you have just added money in, money out, and internal transfers between your own balances.
The other trap is signs. Fee is written as a negative, so Net is Gross plus Fee, not Gross minus Fee. Get that backwards and you double the fee on every row. This page keeps the sign convention PayPal actually uses, groups by Type before totaling anything, and treats Balance as a snapshot column that never gets summed.
How to export from PayPal
- Sign in and open Activity Go to paypal.com, open the Activity tab, then choose Download at the right of the filter bar. On a business account this sits under Reports, then Activity download.
- Choose a custom date range PayPal defaults to the last month. Widen it to a full quarter so the trend chart has something to show, and note that the range is capped, so very long histories need two or three files.
- Pick the CSV format Choose Comma delimited, all transactions, rather than the balance-affecting-only option. The full set includes refunds and fee rows that the shorter version silently drops.
- Wait for the report to build PayPal queues the file. It appears under Reports, then Download history, usually within a few minutes, and stays available for a couple of weeks.
- Drop the file here It is parsed in your browser. The Type column becomes a filter chip immediately, so you can look at only Express Checkout Payments if that is what you meant by sales.
Older PayPal accounts still offer the legacy activity download with slightly different headers. Both shapes work here; the column names below are from the current report.
Try with sample PayPal data (the same columns, 110 rows, no upload needed).
What the dashboard shows
Every panel below is built from a column that is actually in the export, named the way PayPal names it.
- Sales over time, net of fees. Date plus Time forms the axis, and the value is Gross plus Fee so the line is what you actually received.
- Type breakdown. Express Checkout Payment, Subscription Payment, Refund and General Withdrawal as separate bars, which is the only honest way to read this file.
- Effective fee rate. Total Fee against total Gross for the payment rows, which is usually a percentage point higher than people expect once cross-border fees are in.
- Currency mix. Currency as a group-by, with a warning when more than one appears, because Gross is not comparable across them.
- Top buyers. Name and From Email Address ranked by net received, with repeats collapsed.
- Country spread. Country is a full name in this export rather than a code, and it maps straight to the geography panel.
Date,Time,TimeZone,Name,Type,Status,Currency,Gross,Fee,Net,Balance,Transaction ID,From Email Address,Country,Item Title,Invoice NumberWhat trips people up in a PayPal download
- Fee is negative. A 3.49% fee on a 100 dollar payment appears as -3.98, and Net is 96.02. If your formula subtracts Fee from Gross you have charged yourself twice.
- Date and Time are two columns. Plus a third for TimeZone. No spreadsheet sorts that correctly out of the box, and the time zone is your account setting rather than UTC.
- The date format follows your locale. Most accounts write DD/MM/YYYY. An American reader importing that file gets the 3rd of April read as the 4th of March for the first twelve days of every month.
- Balance is a running total. It is the state of the account after each row, so summing it produces a meaningless number that grows with the row count.
- Currency Conversion rows come in pairs. One negative in the source currency, one positive in the target. Include them in a revenue total and you count the same money twice, in two currencies.
- Transaction IDs are text. They are alphanumeric and long. Excel will happily convert some of them to scientific notation, which is unrecoverable. Here they stay as strings.
The short version: filter by Type first, trust Net over Gross, and never sum Balance. Once those three are true the file is genuinely useful, and it is the only place a PayPal-only seller can see fees clearly.
Frequently asked questions
Why does my PayPal total not match my bank deposits?
Because the activity report is your PayPal balance ledger, not your bank statement. Money arrives as payments, sits in the balance, and leaves in lumps as General Withdrawal rows. A quarter of sales and a quarter of withdrawals rarely match, since the timing differs and some balance stays behind. Filter to withdrawals if you want the bank view, and to payments if you want the sales view.
Should I subtract the Fee column from Gross?
No, add it. PayPal writes fees as negative numbers, so Gross plus Fee equals Net, and the Net column is already there to check yourself against. This catches a surprising number of people, because every other payment processor writes fees as positives. The dashboard here uses PayPal's convention and reconciles against the Net column so a mismatch would be visible.
How do I stop refunds from inflating my revenue?
They do not inflate it, as long as you keep them. A refund is its own row with a negative Gross and a Type of Refund, so a straight sum already nets them out. The mistake goes the other way: filtering to only Completed payments removes the refunds and overstates revenue. This page keeps every row and lets Type do the separating.
Can I handle multiple currencies in one file?
You can read them, but do not total them. PayPal writes each transaction in its own currency with no converted column, unlike Stripe. The dashboard flags when the Currency column has more than one value and offers it as a group-by, so you get one total per currency instead of one nonsense total across all of them. Convert outside if you need a single number.
Why are my dates wrong by a few days?
Almost certainly a DD/MM against MM/DD problem. PayPal writes the date in the format matching your account locale, and most non-US accounts get day first. Excel guesses based on your machine's locale rather than the file, so the two disagree for any day of the month below thirteen. The parser here checks the whole column for a day above twelve before deciding, which resolves it in almost every real file.
Is there a row limit on the download?
PayPal caps the date range rather than the row count, so a busy account gets several files for one quarter. You can drop them here one at a time, or stitch them together first with the CSV merger and load one combined file. Deduplicate on Transaction ID afterwards if the ranges overlap, which they often do by a day at each boundary.
Related tools
Load a PayPal activity report and see it reconciled
110 rows of realistic activity: payments, refunds, a withdrawal, a currency conversion, fees as negatives. Exactly the shapes that break a spreadsheet.
Open the sample PayPal dashboard