PayPal and Nonprofit status

Scoutbook Using Scoutbook & Scoutbook Plus
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PayPal is officially supported in Scoutbook (though there’s apparently some question about whether it’s allowable to use PayPal in this way to pay for, e.g., memberships). However, I’m running into a difficulty in verifying nonprofit status in order to qualify for lower fee rates. PayPal needs the Tax ID or verifying documents to match the name used on your PayPal account. The problem, of course, is that the relevant nonprofit organization here is our Chartering Organization, not the Troop.

Has anyone found a way around this? How have others coped with this issue?

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Have you asked the CO?

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What am I supposed to ask them?

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That as a program of their organization, may you use their Tax ID number? Working with our PTO, they ended up not having one as they use the districts when needed. The School district isn’t interested in letting us use theirs. So, that was our dead end, but I know some orgs that don’t mind.

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I have gotten permission to use their tax number. PayPal rejects it, because the account is in the name of the troop, not the church.

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Gotcha. No fix for that. Call PayPal? <ducks head - I assume there is no one to call>

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Alright, I’ll give that a shot. I was just wondering whether anyone has gotten this to work, and how.

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Can you put the account in the name of the church with Troop 999 at the end? Or does it reject that too?

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I don’t know; I’ll have to try that. At this point, it won’t even try, and is asking for further documentation, but I’ll mess around and see what I can do.

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We have PayPal accounts for both our pack and crew using our Charter Org (church) information, but let me warn you that PayPal keeps freezing our accounts and asking for us to resubmit all the tax documents again. This is happening monthly and it was driving us crazy. So I called and was told that this is a PayPal policy to ensure that the entities are indeed non-profit and we are not laundering money. We are now considering going back to paper checks and getting out of the whole PayPal process. The hassle is not worth the small amount we save per transaction.

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Okay, so how did you do that? Did you put the Church name in the PayPal account name, or what?

Thanks for the warning. Ugh.

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Our troop went round and round with WePay (replaced PayPal payment system in SignupGenius) on the exact same issue. They withheld funds until we jumped through all sorts of hoops.

The solution to their verification riddle was:

  1. copy of the charter and proof of address
  2. proof that the unit and CO (Their taxid) are NPOs
  3. letter, on CO letterhead that our unit treasurer ( on bank signature card) was, in fact, authorized by our CO to handle funds on behalf of our unit and in the interest of the CO

Our COR was very helpful getting the information from the CO.

Oddly enough, our pack set up their WePay account about 1 year earlier with no hassle whatsoever.

The experience was so bad that I will not use SignupGenius or WePay, instead opting for EventBrite… a little more expensive but very robust system and account easy setup.

Good luck.

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It seems like the simplest workaround for PayPal is to just send all monies using the Friends and Family option - there are no associated fees with that. And certainly all the adult scouts and parents in a Troop can be considered friends.

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You may be right. However, that eliminates the benefits of Scoutbook integration.

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Agreed, but at this point there are still open technical issues which are detrimental to Troop finances. There is still the option to manually input finances on a per scout basis in Scoutbook. My point of view is certainly biased in that I do not have a large number of scouts to deal with. I suppose my position is just that there are manual ways to use electronic funds without adding costs to the Troop - the question becomes a trade-off of time to expense.

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