PayPal Stories Archive

According to the small business mentoring organization SCORE, the majority of small business owners spend more than 41 hours a year on accounting and tax preparation. Isn't there a better way to spend your time? With the right tools, you can streamline your accounting and take care of all of the reporting and projections you need to run your business. Here’s a look at how PayPal and Intuit QuickBooks can help get your taxes in order and free up more time to focus on doing the work you love.

 

 

Get organized for tax time the easy way, whether you’re an independent contractor, online store owner or you send invoices directly from PayPal. Look for PayPal’s tax documents and other reports to start downloading everything you need. PayPal's 1099-K reports how much money you received selling goods and services through PayPal and lists your gross total payments.

 

You should know, however, that you must meet two requirements for PayPal to issue you a 1099-K: $20,000 in payments for the year and 200 payments for the year. If you don't meet these requirements — you'll have to use your own records to determine how much business income you had.

 

 

Businesses have a lot of financial information and documentation to keep track, but you can use PayPal’s online forms to access customer agreements and manage recurring payments and billing agreements. You can also see an overview of any disputes and chargebacks to get a clear picture of the financial health of your business for the fiscal year.

 

 

PayPal's inventory, profit and loss report can help you track your inventory and see more details about revenue generated. The report pulls from the buttons you created for your website (whether “Buy Now” or “Order Now”) to compile the numbers you need to get ready for tax time. Sort by the month or get an overview for the year.

 

 

There’s no need to reinvent the wheel if you want to use QuickBooks and PayPal together. Instead of manually inputting all of your transactions from PayPal into QuickBooks, use the free Sync with PayPal app instead. Once you’re set up, access your sales transactions, fees, taxes and discounts for tax season without ever leaving QuickBooks.

 

 

Is the freelancing economy helping fuel your business? When you've paid out $600 or more in compensation to your contractors and freelancers, you'll need a 1099-MISC and report payments to the IRS. Instead of doing it all with digital copies, printouts and emails back and forth to your contractors, you can manage it all in QuickBooks instead. All of your accounting data is already entered and QuickBooks can help you navigate the entire process.

 

 

Tax time sends small business owners scrambling to get their balance sheets in order to see their assets, liabilities and equity all in one place. There's a manual way to do it by creating a spreadsheet listing everything from pre-paid expenses to marketable securities. But QuickBooks can generate one automatically without ever entering items into categories. The software knows what you want based on what you already entered into the system, saving you the time and frustration from doing it again.

 

 

It's easy to get so overwhelmed with what you need to report that you overlook valuable deductions. But your vehicle and home office, among other work expenses, are deductible and can help save you money. Keep careful records of any deductions in QuickBooks instead of guessing. Come tax time, the IRS doesn’t look kindly on winging it — it wants to see precise record keeping. Generating your reports from QuickBooks can help you stay clear of deduction troubles.