[jvdh]

The business of PayPal is to allow you to accept payments over the internet at a reasonable rate.

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.

[dangrossman]

You cannot produce accurate records without PayPal's reporting, as there is no other way to know what exchange rate was used on a particular transaction, what fees were assessed, what chargeback and dispute fees and reversals occurred, etc.

[jvdh]

I assume you're doing business, selling goods or some kind of service. I do hope that you check beforehand whether someone pays for their goods/services before you give it to them right? At which point you have an accurate record for that client?

[dangrossman]

I assume you have not done business and accepted online payments before at any volume, or you would not put forward such a naive argument.

If I had to log in to the PayPal website and manually copy the full transaction details for every payment 50-100 times per day, I would have to hire a full time employee just to do that. They'd also need to manually log in and re-review every transaction any time there is a refund, bank reversal, PayPal claim, chargeback, eCheck failure, etc. There is no way to calculate the resulting changes yourself -- only PayPal knows what exchange rate will apply to a given payment or refund. Merely recording payments will not provide an accurate financial record.

All this to replicate the "generate report" button I click once a month. And I'd still not have accurate information as there is no other place some of the items get reported, like chargeback fees passed on from 3rd party banks to PayPal then to me.

Providing statements is one of the basic responsibilities of any payment processor. They simply have to provide it or you can't accurately file a tax return.