[petercooper]

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.

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.

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.

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 programatically.