Get Customer Paypal Name on Woo Receipt

Hello @friendswoodtech

Thanks for reaching out to us, we’re here to help.

we have found that some customers input their name into our site for the Woo order but sometimes their PayPal account is in another name. Be it husband, business, maiden, etc. This potentially causes a problem when we are reconciling our payments to our orders. […] PayPal payments are recorded into their financials automatically downloaded into Quickbooks showing the PayPal customer name. If the Woo order has a different name, sport reps often have issues matching the transactions in order to reconcile their financials.

We need to better understand the workflow here.

1. Is Quickbooks connected directly with PayPal to obtain payment data (scope of data unknown)?
2. The person managing Quickbooks does not have direct WC access, only access to the WC order confirmation mails?

Is there a way to retrieve the PayPal customer name and place it in the New Order email?

This can be enforced with certain configurations, but it’s not very straightforward.

Or is this information stored anywhere that I can use Advanced Order Export to prepare the report and include this field to help facilitate the match?

If you export a WooCommerce order (meta), it would be best to include the?transaction ID?field as this should provide a unique identifier for each order. Beyond this, the PayPal orders contain a?custom ID, which generally is the order number of the WooCommerce order. There are a few different indicators that can help match a payment from the PayPal dashboard to its respective WooCommerce order and it’s primarily a question of the workflow and which person has access to which system at any given time.

Certainly, it’s easiest if the person managing Quickbooks also had access to the WooCommerce orders to double-check the data.

We’re looking forward to your response.

Kind regards,
Krystian

Thanks so much for your reply. Excellent questions and I suppose I should have given more detail – I struggled with how to describe the entire scenario.

Quickbooks is directly connected to PayPal to obtain payment data. The only information that is captured in the download is the PayPal name and amount.

The real issue is that the sport reps that reconcile “their” accounts don’t have access to PayPal. They receive copies of new order email and periodic export reports of payments and then from the financial side, they get a detailed report of their accounts. So for those PayPal payments, it includes date, PayPal name and amount. If our transactions varied in price then it might be easy to deduce the match, but that’s not the case.

The Treasurer has access to Woo and PayPal, sports reps have Woo access only. For now, I’ve asked the Treasurer to manually note on the PP/QB transaction the Woo name if they notice it to be different. And that works, if they do it. But often times they are dealing with 100+ transactions a day and this gets missed. I was hoping I could find some way to get that data back from PayPal and add it to the receipt or at the very least be able to pull the field in an export report. That might alleviate human error.

For now, I am able to match by order number those in question since I have access to both.

I really appreciate any insight you can provide. I’m open to other solutions as well.

Hello @friendswoodtech

Unfortunately, on the Classic Checkout page, we cannot enforce that the name in the WooCommerce order matches the PayPal account name. This is because, during this process, we submit whatever name is provided in the WooCommerce checkout fields to PayPal, which might differ from the actual PayPal account name.

One solution would be to rely on express payment buttons and skip the final review on checkout. This way, orders are created directly using the data returned by PayPal, which generally ensures that the PayPal name and WooCommerce order name match. However, this approach may not suit all use cases.

As for reconciling payments, identifying WooCommerce orders using only the PayPal name and amount is indeed challenging. PayPal name field alone doesn’t provide sufficient information to ensure a perfect match. If Quickbooks could return some additional data from the PayPal payment, it would be easier but we are not aware if that’s possible?

Kind Regards,

Krystian

Hello @friendswoodtech

Since we have not received any further communication from you, we are assuming that your issue has been resolved.

Therefore, we mark this thread as resolved. If you still have any questions or if a new problem arises, don’t hesitate to open a new thread.

Kind regards,
Krystian