Good morning everyone. Today we are happy to announce the availability of PayPal as an additional payment provider in your online payment settings. You will now be able to accept deposits to money accounts and event fee payments using PayPal. All you need to do is choose PayPal as your payment provider in your online payment settings as shown below. Don't forget to provide the email address of the PayPal account for your unit as well as choose a default money account to post transaction fees to, as show below.
PayPal transaction fees are $.30 + 2.9%. We are working with PayPal to get the percent fee lowered to 2.2% and hope to announce this soon. As with Stripe transactions, a $.25 TroopTrack processing fee is added to each transaction.
Does the money go directly to the troop fund or can it go to a specific scout account?
If it goes to the troop fund, it will then need to be transferred to the appropriate scout account correct? How will the treasurer know which scout account should receive the money?
Also, can you post an example of how this will look in the Money Book?
@sgaines Right now the fee is charged to the troop. We have had a lot of requests to have the fee charged to the parents and will include that as an option soon.
@DonHoover If you get approved as a non-profit by PayPal you can adjust the percentage you are charged in your payment settings.
This PayPal feature seems to be centered on using Credit Cards with PayPal - what about those of us who’ve linked their PayPal account to their bank? The Fees are WAY lower (free even) if you’re not using a Credit Card.
I would very much like to see this - if they use a CC via PayPal, the fees are higher (as you stated previously), but with a bank account it should not include the 2.9% fee. (I don’t recall the fee structure offhand…)
The fees are actually the same either way as far as I know. PayPal doesn’t charge you fees on certain types of transactions, but payments via TroopTrack would not qualify.
Ah… I just checked, and you are correct.
We’ve been using the “send money to a friend” feature to get around that - after all, we’re not “selling” anything when we collect money to cover the cost of a Seabase trip or Dues or similar.
How is it going with them allowing us to claim our non-profit status? Would it help if we filed for that directly with PayPal for our account?
@vincefleming I hope we didn’t give you the impression that we can help with your PayPal non-profit status somehow. We don’t have any influence with PayPal in that regard.
Oh, yeah, I totally forgot about that @vincefleming. I believe that is currently working - am I wrong? It wasn’t based on your status as a non-profit, but on our volume.
We have tried to implement the use of PayPal in our Troop but had to discontinue. The way the fees are structured required our treasurer to make a transfer to Deduct the fees from the scout account for each deposit. Far too much work.
We tried using it for camp outs with the fees already embedded in the camp out cost but we got push back from people who paid from scout account or by check.
If this could be set up so that the sender posted the fees the problem would be solved. Combine that with the ability to choose if paying for events by PayPal, scout account, or check and I think the system would be usable.
