Welcome! This forum has a treasure trove of great info – Scouters helping Scouters! Just a heads up, though - all content, information, and opinions shared on this forum are those of the author, not the BSA.
I setup the PayPal API functionality on our Unit’s ScoutBook account as soon as I saw it available. Looking at how those payments were being processed by PayPal since then I started scratching at why payments were being set to pending, and why I was having to set a date of service. The response I received from PayPal is that their APIs that you must use when setting this up is automatically considering payments as GOODS/SERVICES by PayPal and will be reported to the IRS as taxable. The only way to make it a “personal” transfer is to do so manually, again this is coming directly from the PayPal Helpdesk associates I chatted and spoke with.
Has someone found a way to use this functionality in a way that the PayPal Helpdesk folks aren’t aware of or am I misunderstanding some aspect of this and making a mountain out of a molehill?
My pack used PayPal up until last year when our account was frozen due to this “tax” related issue. We were able to talk our way out of the issue and get the account unlocked long enough to remove all our funds. We’ve never used PayPal again for this goods/services tax issue.
This sounds like a big deal! I was just about to set up a PayPal account for our new troop, and was wondering how to go about it—whether to use a Business or Personal account, for instance.
From this, it sounds like connecting PayPal to Scoutbook is a terrible idea!
Is there more “official” guidance on this? This certainly doesn’t sound like what was intended when Scoutbook implemented PayPal support!
