Generate reports

Reports provide transaction-level insights that help manage day-to-day operations. Using the daily-updated reports, you can:

• Reconcile and manage revenue. For information on key reconciliation use cases and the appropriate reports for these use cases, see the Reports reconciliation guide.   
• Review transactional details of activities.  
• Handle disputes and chargebacks.

PayPal’s secure file transfer protocol (SFTP) server enables you to access PayPal processing results as reports.

1. Contact PayPal to set up Reports access for your account.
2. After you get access to the Reports feature, create an SFTP user account.
1. Log into your PayPal account.
2. Hover over your name. A drop-down menu is displayed.
3. Click Account Settings. The Account access page is displayed.
4. Click Update next to the Secure FTP item.
5. Follow the UI instructions to complete the user account setup. The final UI page displays the new user information.

Note: Typically, it takes up to 48 hours to create an SFTP server user account. When the server is ready, PayPal sends a message to your primary email address.

3. Download reports.

You can communicate with the SFTP server through the command line or any SFTP client of your choice, such as WinSCP, Cyberduck, or FileZilla. For more information on server communication, see PayPal SFTP server specification.

Note: Contact PayPal to subscribe to transaction reports. After a successful subscription, navigate to your PayPal account and subscribe to the report. After this, you can download reports from PayPal’s live or sandbox environment.

To download reports, 

1. Navigate to your terminal. 
2. To access reports from the sandbox environment, use the following command.
   $ sftp <sftp_account_username>@reports.sandbox.paypal.com
3. To access reports from the live environment, use the following command.
   $ sftp <sftp_account_username>@reports.paypal.com
4. When prompted, enter your SFTP account password
5. Navigate to the outgoing reports directory.
   $ cd ppreports/outgoing
6. List files in the directory, review file (report) names, and use the get command to download the requisite report.
   $ ls
$ get <filename>
7. Log off from the SFTP server.
   $ exit