PayPal, Stripe and Wise statements to CSV: fees, currencies and payouts

Published 19 October 2026 · by Tekiba

Start from their CSV, not the PDF

PayPal's help says “You can download a report of your transaction activity for up to the past seven years as a PDF, Quicken, QuickBooks, CSV, or TAB file. Your request can include up to 12 months of activity at a time.” Its statement PDFs have a limit: “If there are more than 10,000 transactions, no transactions appear in the PDF.” (Merchants in a handful of European countries and Australia get every transaction in monthly statements.) Stripe's PDFs are capped too: “Itemized PDF exports include up to 5,000 rows. If the dialog doesn’t show PDF, use a CSV export.” Wise lists “Web: PDF, XLSX (Excel), CSV, MT940, QIF, or CAMT.053 (version 10 only)”, the last three meant for accounting software.

So the PDF is the copy to keep, and the CSV the one to work from. Converting a PDF only makes sense when it is all you have — an old statement, or one someone sent you.

Fees: a column, or a line of its own

A bank statement shows what reached the account. A payment service shows what the customer paid and what it kept. PayPal's reports give each transaction a Gross, a Fee and a Net: Gross is “The localized gross amount of the transaction, including fees.”, and Net is “The localized net amount of the transaction (typically the gross minus any fees)”. Stripe's balance report has the same three columns, gross, fee and net, and its API documentation describes the fee as “Fees (in the smallest currency unit) paid for this transaction.” Some fees are not tied to a sale at all and arrive as their own lines — Stripe lists types such as stripe_fee and stripe_fx_fee, and PayPal has fee event codes of its own.

Wise lets you choose: “For accounting statements, tick the box to have fees shown separately.”

What to decide: whether your books record the gross sale and the fee as two figures, or the net alone. The running balance follows the net. If you want both, keep the Gross and Fee columns and let your accounting software split them; if you only keep Net, the fees disappear from view. Whoever keeps your books will have a preference.

Currencies: one balance each

A PayPal or Wise account is really several accounts, one per currency. PayPal says that a payment in another currency is “automatically accepted in the currency received, and a new currency balance is opened in your PayPal account.” Moving money between those balances is a conversion, which shows as its own entry; on rates, Wise says “You’ll always get the mid-market exchange rate when converting money. And we charge a fee to convert money between currencies in your account, which varies from currency to currency.” Stripe converts to your settlement currency unless you have set up several.

What to do: download one statement per currency, or split the service's CSV by its Currency column, and check each currency's rows against that currency's opening and closing balance. A conversion appears in both: money out of one balance, money in to the other. Neither is income or spending; both belong to the same transfer. Card purchases abroad on an account in your own currency are different again; foreign currency transactions and fees in a bank statement CSV covers them.

Payouts: one deposit, many sales

When the money moves on to your bank, the bank statement shows one deposit. Stripe is direct about what that deposit is: automatic payouts “can include funds from multiple transactions.” Its payout reconciliation report exists to connect them, and its balance report treats a payout differently: “Payouts are recorded as simple transfers between your Stripe account and your bank account, which don’t correspond to any specific payments.”

What to watch: counting the same money twice. If the sales go into your books from the payment service's file and the deposit goes in again from the bank's, income is doubled. Treat the deposit as a transfer from the payment account to the bank — and if a payout is ever negative, as a transfer the other way.

If the PDF is all you have

LedgerDrop reads statement PDFs in the browser; it has not been tested on PayPal, Stripe or Wise layouts, which are not on the formats page. What to expect:

• Headings. It knows Date, Description, Amount and Balance; Gross, Fee and Net are not in its vocabulary. Name the columns under “Columns and date format”: Net as the Amount and the running balance as Balance gives rows that add up to the statement. The CSV holds one amount per row, so the Gross and Fee columns are left out.
• Currency. A figure with a symbol in front, such as €12.00, or none is read. One printed together with a three-letter code, such as 12.00 EUR or US$12.00, is not. LedgerDrop's CSV has no currency column, so once a mixed statement is converted its rows cannot be told apart by currency. Ask the service for one statement per currency instead, or mark each row's currency from the PDF before you import anything.
• The check. Where the statement prints an opening and closing balance LedgerDrop recognises, it checks the rows against them; where it does not, the check says unknown rather than guessing.

Tidying the CSV before import

1. One file per currency, and one per service.
2. Choose gross and fee, or net, and use the same for every month.
3. Mark conversions and payouts as transfers, not sales or spending.
4. Check each file's balance against the statement's opening and closing figures. How to check a converted bank statement CSV for errors covers the arithmetic.
5. Fix the format — dates, signs, plain numbers — as described in clean up a bank statement CSV before you import it.

What this page cannot tell you

How a particular conversion or fee is laid out in your statement; the services describe their CSV columns in more detail than their PDFs, and Wise does not publish its CSV column names. Nor does it say how fees, conversions or payouts belong in your books, which depends on how they are kept. Fee rates and exchange margins vary by country and are not covered.

Questions