When I read it again.<p>He contacts paypal support from another email id associated with a different paypal account. Paypal support sends him the report for that account and closes his ticket.<p>While there is no question that paypal has to get its things in order (able to generate the report correctly), but I think the blogger was also responsible for part of the confusion.
If e-mail wasn't getting him anywhere, why hasn't he picked up the phone and called? My experience has been that the people on the phone were more knowledgeable and had more power to work on an account than the people responding to e-mails. And you don't have to wait.
As a PayPal user, I find this sort of issue more alarming than the usual temporary hold stories :-( That said, there should always be a second set of backup data for transactions you process.<p>You can lean on the receipts and transaction data stored by your chosen shopping cart or similar system. Even if the taxman won't accept these stats as authoritative, they're a good placeholder.<p>If everything is done with Buy Now buttons, though, things get a lot more difficult as the only remaining transactional record are the e-mails PayPal sends you which will be pretty tricky to collate.<p>Darren should also look into PayPal's various APIs (sadly there are so many..) though, as there's probably a way to slurp the transactional data one by one but <i>programatically</i>.
Every time I see a PayPal horror story, I think, "if only these people were to write to their representatives in Congress about the laws that allow PayPal and the banks to main their monopoly, something might actually happen." PayPal isn't going to change.<p>There's a mobile payments hearing in Congress on March 22nd. (See <a href="http://financialservices.house.gov/Calendar/EventSingle.aspx?EventID=284912" rel="nofollow">http://financialservices.house.gov/Calendar/EventSingle.aspx...</a>). The witness list is closed and my guess is that no startup is represented. If you're interested in making your views known, e-mail me and I'll get you in touch with the right people.
The business of PayPal is to allow you to accept payments over the internet at a reasonable rate.<p>The business of PayPal is not to outsource your financial administration. If you run a million dollar business and you're relying on PayPal to keep the records for your tax, you're doing something wrong.
For me to read this article I have to sign up for a Google plus account. No go. I'm trying to reduce my daily social media intake, thankyouverymuch.<p>Just keep in mind if you post on Google plus and no where else, you are limiting your audience. I, for one, will not read it.