PaySketch

New Features with v7.2

Vivek Nanda — Tue, 05 Jul 2016 13:44:30 +0000

Shortly after the release of v7 for PaySketch, we started getting user feedback on more features that would make our end users lives easier and here we are with another release in 3 months with a good load of them.

Instantly switch between connected PayPal accounts

This was one of the most requested features since we started support for our users to connect multiple PayPal accounts with PaySketch. Not that switching between accounts was difficult – it just required an application restart. With v7.2, we did away with that and users can instantly switch between their connected PayPal accounts without having the need to restart PaySketch.

Transaction Mapping

With the ever increasing frontiers for PayPal, they keep introducing newer and innovative ways to do business. This also brought a challenge for us to map transaction types, where we needed to push the newer types with upgrades and users had to wait until then. With v7.2 we came up with an amazing mapping scheme where you get the power to map all possible transaction types in your account and classify them as Sales and/or Payment.

Granular Synchronization Control

Users now get to fine tune and control when and how frequently PaySketch fetches new data and whether the dashboards reload with new data automatically. These settings have been embedded in the Settings Dashboard -> Synchronization tab.

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Download PayPal Transactions

Vivek Nanda — Fri, 10 Jun 2016 07:48:53 +0000

For any business using PayPal, it is crucial to keep track of transactions for maintaining records, creating balance sheets, and even for collecting email addresses (leads). The transaction history is basically a compiled list of all the primary transactions that have taken place through your PayPal account. These transactions include the ones for payments sent/received, debit/credit requests, donations, refunds, amount roll-backs, chargeback fee etc. However, downloading transactions directly from PayPal wasn’t so easy until PaySketch came into being.

If you ever had the need to download PayPal transactions from their website, you would quick realize the pain it takes to perform hop 3-4 pages, type in date values, select a file type and then click on the Download button – just to wait for another few minutes (if you have more than a handful of transactions) before finally getting your hands on them.

With PaySketch, its a breeze to download PayPal transactions as csv. No matter the number of transactions or the date range you have in mind – download PayPal transactions in 1 click and all it takes is a couple of seconds before you can start viewing and analyzing them! This PayPal transaction history is downloaded in CSV format so that you can open it easily in Excel or Google Spreadsheet or any other CSV file reader.

We just got started with the features!

There is much more that you can do with PaySketch – downloading PayPal transactions is just the basic functionality! Going one level deep, you can not only download all transactions, but also the ones that are just for sales or payments, or transactions of or excluding certain types or statuses, transactions around particular currencies or originating from certain countries too! More importantly, you can download customer names and email addresses too – all of them in just 1 click.

PaySketch brings fortune 500 class analytics and reporting at your fingertips. It innovates a very practical approach towards efficiently managing and growing your business around PayPal. Right after you open the application, it shows a 360 degree view in a Summry Dashboard that depicts how well you’ve been doing with all aspects of your business. This is how the Summary Dashboard looks:-

We bet that you could never have imagined that any software for PayPal, to act so intelligently and beautifully lay out so much information about your business.

Get Started with PaySketch for FREE

All of this is closest to the real time data that you have in PayPal.

You can choose to get upto 8 different dashboard accesses, each of which uniquely analyses, applies intelligence and presents a wide array of information around transactions, sales, payments, customers and products. You can even search through PayPal transactions with the option of creating upto 50 different filters, create PayPal financial and sales reports, a report for subscriptions, products and country wise sales distribution. See how each dashboard looks like and what information it draws by clicking on the dashboard thumbnails shown below.

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Subscriptions Report for PayPal

Vivek Nanda — Mon, 30 May 2016 08:01:11 +0000

Being able to generate a report on Subscription based payments from PayPal was much sought after by a good number of our users and with the latest version of PaySketch, you can create subscription report for PayPal in not time. If you run a subscriptions based business (or as they call a recurring revenue business model), the you must have always had more and more of these questions with time:-

How much have I made with subscription based payments (as opposed to one time payments)
How do I check Active PayPal Subscriptions
How to view all Subscriptions from my customers
How to see Canceled Subscriptions so as to reach out to lost customers and help bring them back on-board

Well, we’ve had these questions all the time too, so we created this very crucial and neat looking Subscriptions Report for PayPal merchants. It is composed of 3 primary sections:-

Historic trend
Subscriptions list
Subscription details

Historic Trend

The Historic trend sketches New and Canceled subscriptions over any period of time. It also plots payments to help you get the right marking on revenues. Trends such as these are very helpful in determining business growth, gray areas and show all possible indicators for upstream and downstream revenue trends.

Subscriptions List

The Subscriptions list section follows up with the subscriptions and their states so that you know high level details about each one of them. Moreover, this table allows you to very quickly download/export the PayPal subscriptions report in Excel and PDF.

Subscriptions Details

There is also a details section shown adjacent to the list of all subscriptions. It clearly lists out complete details for any selected subscription in a second – this includes the subscriber name, subscription start date, entire subscription history, gross revenues and a tonne of other important factors.

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PaySketch 7.0

Vivek Nanda — Wed, 02 Mar 2016 06:07:24 +0000

As Daniel Keys Moran rightly quotes

You can have data without information, but you cannot have information without data.

Today we announce the release of PaySketch 7.0 – a powerful, end-to-end solution that packs all the information that you would want to see from your online sales through PayPal and much more. With this, we continue to follow our legacy to empower PayPal merchants by making them more aware about their businesses and keeping them up-to-date with their account activity, composing analytically driven pointers for quick catch ups, and helping them make better business decisions with enterprise class reporting.

PaySketch is now more feature packed and we’d like to give you a glimpse of all the new aspects and changes that you’ll experience with the 7th generation of this software.

Summary Dashboard

The Summary dashboard looks all new, neatly segmented into tiles, and filled with tonnes of crucial information. We’ve included a vast number of new KPIs that cover a variety of verticals; each of which groups into families they belong to and are shown together in batches. It has newer donut charts to represent product performances, a smoother color tone and selectively chosen font styles so that you can view and analyse the crucial information spot on. Here’s how the new Summary Dashboard looks:-

The Summary Dashboard now covers all verticals on which PaySketch reports. Since all of these are important to any business, even users who use the PaySketch Standard plan get to see these high level KPIs. Here’s a link to the older summary dashboard, if you’d like to picture the leap forward.

TimeZones

One of the biggest feature (or probably the biggest in terms of product logic for this version) was adding support for TimeZone changes. Earlier versions of PaySketch use to report and show data around GMT. That’s because PayPal never gives out timezone information. But now, with PaySketch 7.0, you can configure the timezone in which you wish to see data across all dashboards – right in the product. So no matter, if you’re in Pacific/ Eastern/ Central/ GMT or any other timezone, you can change it in just a couple of clicks. Here’s where you can do it from the Settings Dashboard

Its pretty straightforward. Go to the Settings Dashboard -> Dashboards tab -> under the Date and Time display settings, choose the timezone of your preference and hit the Save button. Restart the application to view all content in the chosen timezone. Default is GMT.

Multiple Account Currencies

Until now, PaySketch use to show the account balance only for the primary account currency. However, many of our power users requested for this feature where they wanted to view their account balances in all currencies for which they have a PayPal balance. With this release of PaySketch, you can view the account balance for all currencies (when you have multiple currencies and balances setup in your PayPal account). To view these, simply click on the dropdown arrow shown next to the account currencies and a list will show up with the information. Select the one you’d like to continue to see as balance until the next update.

Subscriptions Report

Another facet around which received lots of request over time from our users was introducing something related to Subscriptions. Subscription payments are a little different than one time payments, and are treated highly among many businesses. Many businesses gauge health, customer loyalty and overall performance by looking at metrics from subscription based payments. The rule of thumb is – if buyers continue to be enrolled and subscribed to the product/service offering, you have good products and happy customers. Other way round, a high churn/ cancellation rate, right away brings up red flags and steps need to be taken to work upon building the business properly. To help with this, we have included a new report that includes key indicators – Subscription Payments, New Subscriptions and Canceled Subscriptions.

These 3 factors sum up the entire picture in a smooth linear-area chart that progresses over time. Payments and New subscriptions help realize the business potential and cancellations point to possible weak spots which need to be realized and addressed.

Tracking Shipments

PaySketch already allows you to mark a product shipped, but a missing and nice to have feature was the ability to add tracking information. Now, you can! Simply click on the Add sign, shown next to the Tracking label for every sale you get through PayPal, enter the carrier (Fedex, UPS etc) along with the tracking number. So now, if you ever want to track a PayPal shipment, just pull up the sale on PaySketch and have the tracking info right at your fingertips.

Auto Refresh & Reload

PaySketch automatically checks for new data as you start the application and use to reload the dashboards with newer information as it was available. Our thought was to keep users updated with the latest information – turns out many people didn’t like the idea of getting new data as they started the app; moreover, atleast not when they are working on a dashboard and doing some calculations. So now, you can turn both these features off from the Settings Dashboard -> Synchronization tab. By default, they are turned on and active.

Send Money and Issue Refunds anytime

No one actually loves to Send Money or Issue Refunds, but just for convenience sake, you can now do either even when transactions are being processed and downloaded in the background. Earlier, this was enabled only when the account was fulled synchronized and all data was up-to-date.

Recover forgotten username

Given the sheer amount of accounts one has to maintain these days, it is really difficult to maintain and remember all username and password combinations. Which is why there are password managers. But given that PaySketch is linked to your financial data, we wanted password managers to take a break here. But that brought a newer different issue – users complaining about forgetting their login username! So now, you can retrieve your login username, by answering the security question – the answer to it needs to be known. If you don’t know the username, password and the answer to security question (which you had set), the only way out is to reset the application and start fresh. You can do so right from the login screen, by clicking on the Forgot Username link.

Navbar

Elements in the navbar has been reordered to integrate them better from the usage point of view. The dashboard selector dropdown now finds place in the extreme right – given that is more frequently used than any other element on the navbar, and thus has to be the easiest to reach. The Send Money button, background activity indicator and internet connectivity indicator lead the dashboard selector dropdown.

Selectable fields

Values within fields such as shipping addresses, transaction id and tracking numbers can now be selected and copied using the mouse and keyboard. This was not possible in the earlier versions of PaySketch.

Color Palette

A refreshing new, smoother and modern color palette has found home in the latest version of PaySketch. Greens are now more natural, Orange is less rust like and Reds won’t pinch you in the eyes.

These changes, summed up with tonnes of other code for performance and bug fixes went into building PaySketch 7.0. Please feel free to take the new version for a spin. You can update your copy of PaySketch following this simple update tutorial, or just wait for the auto-updater to pick it up.

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PaySketch 6.0: multi-currency support, super cache, subscriptions and more…

Vivek Nanda — Mon, 01 Jun 2015 18:25:26 +0000

We’re announcing PaySketch 6.0 today – our most worked-upon, feature-packed and refined software release to date. Like 5.1 this one too has been built ground up with a joint effort between our users and the engineering team. With the help provided from your contiguous feedback and enhancement requests, we were able to work upon the most useful (and desired) features, fix issues and beef up the product so that it provides more value to your business while you save both, time and money. The most prominent changes, features and fixes that you will notice with PaySketch 6.0 are:-

Multi-Currency Support

This one was the highest on feature list, with most of our users requesting of a way to be able to track their sales from currencies other than the account’s primary currency. The multi-currency support has been added across all dashboards. Users will now be able to view, filter and search across each aspect of their business for any particular currency. And yes, we didn’t miss adding it to the Summary Dashboard – see lifetime sales, product and customer insights for each and every currency that you’ve transacted in.

Super Cache

Until 5.1, data across all dashboards got reset to their initial state on revisit. PaySketch 6.0 now cache’s the state of every single dashboards, so when we want to go verify a sales transaction and see its revenue contribution from the Products Dashboard, be assured that you will end up having the same view in place on revisiting the Sales Dashboard. This holds true for all the dashboards – they will from now on, only refresh to the initial state when there is new data, so that you don’t keeping seeing a stale state of things. With caching, we’ve also improved a lot on the time to switch and load data, when transitioning from a dashboard to the other. Switching to a pre-cached dashboard should now take a split second!

Try it out to experience the agility.

Safe Mode

A very small cluster of our high volume account users had been facing issues while trying to connect PaySketch to Paypal. The strange part was, that it didn’t occur every single time! At times, it all went through without a hiccup whereas sometime it as was stubborn as goat :). Our engineering team really burnt the mid-night oil to come up with a fix to this – a safe mode. The Safe Mode guarantees super strong TCP connections over HTTPS with PayPal, and we haven’t seen the issue again.

This mode of operation is recommended only for users who are having difficulties connecting PaySketch to their PayPal account. One can enable and disable safe mode from the Settings Dashboard.

Subscriptions support

With PaySketch 6.0, you now get a complete profile and summary on all subscription based transactions. The profile and summary are shown on the details panel of every grid based dashboard. Clicking on the Subscription id will trigger a hotspot search to all transactions bound to the particular subscription.

Product Search

The product search allows searching through the complete inventory of products. This adds on top of all applicable filters within the Products Dashboard. The search filter works as you type, so results will auto-populate as the keyword is changed (4 characters or more).

Report on Countries and Products

The reporting engine now supports creating detailed reports on Countries and Products. Users will now be able to select upto 4 filters based upon which the reports will be rendered:-

Time frame
Currency
Specific product/country
Details

The time-frame allows you to specify the search criteria for sale of products to certain countries that were completed within a certain timeslot. This is a mandatory filter.

The currency filter allows consideration of sales only for a specific currency. This is an optional filter and when not selected, all sales transactions for the above mentioned timeframe are considered.

Country/Product selection: This filter allows selection of a particular product or country to which the product was sold. This too is an optional filter.

Details: Checking the show details option will list complete details of countries in which the product was sold (or products sold in specific countries when the Countries Report is selected). This too is an option filter and will work only when the Currency filter is set.

Order Details

View Order details and download them from across all dashboards with a single click. Additionally, the Customers Dashboard now allows has the functionality that lets you download all the orders for any customer with just a single click.

Numeric representation of stats

We really like to support your business, and with growing business, there comes in an increase sales revenue – which is a good thing. So all dashboards now show numbers abbreviated in Ks (for thousands) and Ms (millions.. phew ), so that you don’t have to count the digits to know your business is doing really well! Hovering over any such number will show the exact and precise details.

Other list of features added with this release include:-

A help icon across each dashboard, that gives instant access to the software manual page for the dashboard.
Highlights in Sales and Products now show the currency into question.
Hotspot searches (the ones that work when you click on any Transaction Status, Type, Country or ID) are now much faster (atleast 2X)
Stop Sync – in case you started syncing PaySketch with PayPal for say 5 years and realize that it would be too much of data to be actually useful, you can now stop the initial sync process from the Settings Dashboard.
Home page now loads faster (at 4X speed, should we say much faster).
Connectivity refresh button in the Settings Dashboard now instantly checks for any connectivity problems.

Upgrade Now

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PaySketch 5.1 Released

Vivek Nanda — Sun, 15 Feb 2015 19:30:00 +0000

Today, we announce version 5.1 for PaySketch. To date, this is the largest minor release that we’ve developed and credit goes to all the feedback and joint contribution that our user have chipped in with. We have made some great features and astounding product progress with version 5.1 and here they are…

Geographic Information

PaySketch now imports geographic information (countries) for all transactions! This comes in as a big addition to the forecasts, search, filtration and reporting capabilities of the product. Grids across the product will now show the originating country of the transaction.

Upgrades

Users upgrading to PaySketch can import geographic information about past transaction with a click of a button. The same can be done by opening the ‘Synchronization‘ tab in the Settings Dashboard, and hitting the Import Countries button.

Search

Users can not search and filter transactions across all dashboards (which show the Country column in the grid), by typing in the complete country name. This will trigger a search through all the transactions in the grid filter down to the matching ones.

Hotspot

Its even easier to locate transactions or sales originating from same countries. Simply click on the all new Country hotspot, as is shown in the Transaction Details section of any transaction and the result will be a subset of transactions – those matching the country shown in the hotspot link.

Additional Filter in Search dashboard

The Search Dashboard gets an additional filter option, where you can include or totally exclude a county from the search criteria. This further expands the flexibility with which you can search for transactions across the board.

Reporting

You will now see a new set of reports showing up in the Search Dashboard. These well thought about reports were designed based on our user feedback, and they contain the gist to sales statistics spread across products forte and countries.

Products Report

Select a date range and a currency – that’s all you would now need to get a complete summary of product sales across the portfolio. The details are disintegrated geographically by country, which helps give a better assessment of localization or products around certain markets. For instance, some markets might prefer hand-made pottery while others might prefer factory made models.

Countries

The Countries report too requires your input on a the date range and currency fronts. It will split the sales by geographic location (country) and further lets you look into details which reflect the hottest selling products in that location.

Both the reports are downloadable in PDF and CSV formats.

Additional Columns

A variety of columns have been added to grid across each dashboard, and they can be made available by simply clicking on the ‘Other‘ option, under Visible dashboard column section from the Settings Dashboard. The following columns are now available :-

Country
Order – includes order name and quantity in the format [Order Name (Quantity)]
Receipt ID
Shipping Address
Shipping Charge

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PaySketch version 5.0 – connect multiple PayPal Accounts

Vivek Nanda — Wed, 14 Jan 2015 14:00:35 +0000

Folks, we are extremely happy to announce the release of version 5.0 for PaySketch! Thanks to your feedback and requirements, we were able to get a complete view of use-cases and that helped expand and fine tune the product. This version packs a lot of bells and whistles, find them listed below:-

PaySketch Professional users now get the ability to connect multiple PayPal accounts using the same software license (upto 5 accounts at any point in time).
A new way of synchronizing data, where you get the ability to select the exact date starting when you want your PayPal data to be downloaded and analyzed.
Sales dashboard metrics now includes non-product sales, so you can count all invoicing and money transfers too.
Access Management will allow account admins to disable money transfers and refunds.
Search and Reporting Dashboards can now be used even for archived transactions.
A lot of query and backend optimization for faster performance across the board.
Upgrading to Business or Professional versions of the product is now a 1 click job.
Moving the software license to a different computer has been made easier. Users get a 1 time Transfer code which they can use to move the software license.
Smoother transitions and additions to transaction details.

To upgrade PaySketch, simply logon to the software and navigate to the Settings Dashboard. Hit the Registration Tab, and click on the software upgrade button. Here’s how:-

The application will ask for your choice between ‘Download now’ or ‘Download later’, prefer to download right away so that you are running the latest version. Once downloading completes, choose ‘Install Now’.

PaySketch will automatically restart after the upgrade installation completes. Sign in with your account credentials and wait for the in-app upgrade to complete. Once you receive a confirmation, feel free to try out the new features and please let us know your feedback.

Thanks from Everyone@PaySketch

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Create Monthly Financial Summary PayPal Report

Vivek Nanda — Fri, 17 Oct 2014 10:55:35 +0000

If you run an online business and accept payments using PayPal, then it often becomes a cumbersome task to manage all the bookkeeping and accounting for financial transactions to and from your PayPal account. With PaySketch though, you can manage PayPal book-keeping and accounting with ease. It also lets you create reports, such as the monthly financial summary PayPal report with categorizes transactional values and sums them up under easily distinguishable and important verticals.

Besides giving you lightning fast access to all the data and report, PaySketch also does not enforce any date selection limitation (like max 31 days as exists if the reports are to be created on PayPal’s website). This saves our users a lot of time and work, which otherwise would have went in collating the data if multiple reports were required to be created given the date selection limitations. All this time saved can be put to more productive areas, rather than copying and pasting on excel spreadsheets.

To create the financial summary report for your PayPal transactions:-

Open PaySketch and login with your username and password.
Navigate to the Reporting Dashboard.
Select Complete Financial Report to be the report type.
Select a date range for which you wish to generate the report, along with the currency.
Hit the Generate Report button and the Financial Summary Report will generated and shown within a few seconds.

PaySketch also gives the options to have the generated reports archived into PDF and CSV formats. This not only helps you keep a tight check on numbers, but also comes in handy when you wish to take print-outs of your business financial data. The generated financial summary reports looks very much like the one which you see on PayPal’s website, with most categories covered completely from top to bottom.

PayPal Monthly Financial Summary Report

Besides letting users create such reports, PaySketch empowers business with real time analytics, accounting, bookkeeping and reporting around their PayPal account.

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Generate API Signature after generating API Certificate in PayPal

Vivek Nanda — Tue, 14 Oct 2014 07:57:49 +0000

This tutorial will show you the way to generate PayPal API Signature after you have already generated an API Certificate. The process is simple and involves deleting the existing certificate so that you get the option to generate the signature back, while trying to update or generate the API access parameters.

To generate the PayPal API Signature, after you’ve already generated the API Certificate requires that you delete the certificate first. To do so :-

Login to your PayPal Account
Navigate to Profile -> My Selling Tools. If you don’t see that option under Profile, simply click on the Profile link and then choose the ‘My Selling Tools’ option from the page that’s visible next.
Locate the API Access option under ‘Selling online‘ and hit the Update link shown next to it. (View the image below, for reference)

You would then see 2 API options to choose from. Select the 2nd option, which has the link ‘View API Certificate‘.

You will now see the API Certificate details, including the Registrant, API username, API password, Fingerprint, Request and expiry dates of the certificate. Hit the Remove Certificate button, and confirm the same when asked for.

That’s all about removing the API Certificate. Now, when you visit the API access page again, you will get the 2 options back – Request API Signature and Request API Certificate. Choose the former, as you’d need to have the API Signature to connect and setup PaySketch with your PayPal account.

View this guide that will walk you through the steps to generate PayPal API Signature and then connect PaySketch to PayPal.

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Application installer file is damaged

Vivek Nanda — Fri, 26 Sep 2014 08:13:36 +0000

We got an email this morning from one of our users stating that he is getting an error message ‘The application could not be installed because the installer file is damaged. Try obtaining a new installer file from the application author’, when he tries to install PaySketch on his computer. So we mulled over application installer logic quite a few times and really didn’t get any gray area that could have caused this to happen. Concluding that there was nothing wrong with our installer, we dug into a few things and seems like the problem has no relation with the installer file at all! There are a couple of possible reasons due to which users get this error message (not just with ours, but probably with any other Adobe Air application installer). Here they are:-

Installer file is damaged

Reason 1: Application already exists on the computer

So one of the 1st test cases that we ran which gave us an error message was when we tried to install PaySketch on a computer, which already had a version of PaySketch installed. Infact, most of the times the installer automatically shouts out ‘ hey, you have it installed already! Do you want to upgrade, overwrite or make changes to it’. Sometimes, however, it bypasses this check and directly shows the error message. So the way to fix this is:-

If you are on Windows, then open up your Program Files (or Program Files (x86)) folder and see if you can locate the folder PaySketch. If you can, then open Windows Control Panel and type in Uninstall in the search box. Open to see the ‘Uninstall or change a program’ window, locate PaySketch and hit the Uninstall button.
If you are on Mac, open Applications and see if you find PaySketch as one of the installed applications. If so, move it to Trash and then make sure to empty the Trash.
Download and install the latest version of Adobe Air from http://get.adobe.com/air
Now, try installing PaySketch and it would run you through the complete installation process without any hiccups.

Reason 2: Application was not uninstalled/cleaned up successfully

Another reason when users could see this message is if the uninstall was not successful. At times, when you are using the application or have one of its system files locked, the uninstall does not clean up everything. That leaves back traces of the application on your computer and that could be the reason that you see the error message while trying to reinstall the software.

The fix for it remains the same – search within the Program Files (on Windows) or Application (on Mac). If found, then try uninstalling again and delete the application’s folder from Program Files. Also empty the recycle bin/trash.
Download and install Adobe Air and then try installing PaySketch again.

We hope that you’ve found a solution reading this KB article, but if not, then please feel free to contact us by sending a quick email to contact@paysketch.com, or through our webiste http://www.paysketch.com/contact/

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