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Recommendations for opening a PayPal Account. Q. What sort of Account should I open for my club? A. Activity Exchange recommends that you open a Business Account, to be specific a "Web Payments Standard" account. Q. Do I Need to give my Credit Card details when opening the Account? A. Yes if you open a Personal account, no if you open a Business account. PayPal need one or the other so that if someone demands a refund from their Credit Card company PayPal can get the money back, otherwise they could be left holding the baby. If you open a Business account you supply a Direct Debit on your clubs Bank account which keeps it all business like and non-personal. This Direct Debit mandate is of course covered by the Direct Debit guarantee. If you use a Personal account covered by a personal Credit/Debit card then you will create privacy problems and difficulty migrating if that person doesn't want their Credit Card to be used in future. Q. Any other reasons for using a Business Account? A. A Business Account allows you to grant read-only access to the account by others. This could be your club auditor or just someone who is not the person looking after the PayPal account. This is great for transparency. Q. Who should look after the PayPal account? A. Activity Exchange recommends that the account is looked after by someone other than your Treasurer. Your Treasurer can then have an oversight role by getting read-only access as explained above. Q. My Club only allows payments to be made with two signatures? A. The recommendation is that you use the PayPal account as a collection account only. That is, in general, you never pay out from this account. The one exception is to make payments to the clubs main Bank Account. Q. How do I open a PayPal Account? A. You can open a PayPal account for your club in only a few minutes. You can find a detailed screen by screen description of how to do this here (Word) and here (PDF). The account will be fully operational and you can use it to receive payments. However the account will be limited, normally it will have withdrawal limits of, say, £500 a month and/or £650 a year. Q. How do I get my limits lifted? A. You will need to jump through a number of PayPal hoops to get this done. This will not be easy. You will need to keep an eye on your "Resolution Center" and check the "lift limits" links that you will see. This will be a multi-stage process as the amount of money that has gone through your account increases. The reason for it is to comply with the European Money Laundering regulations and to protect PayPal. Q. What's it like dealing with PayPal? A. Frustrating. They often ask you for information without being sufficiently explicit so you don't know what they want. You can expect them to say that you've done things that you haven't and not done things that you have. They are likely to ask for information you have already supplied. You can expect them to stick to their version of reality even when it bears no resemblance to what you know or need. Expect to have to battle your way through these obstacles. Q. How can I overcome any difficulties opening the account? A. You can try the online contact methods but they are not very productive. You are probably best phoning them. You will need to go to their "Contact Us" page and work out how to get the phone number and a magic reference number. Armed with these you can give them a ring. You will probably need more determination than is either reasonable or that you would want to have. Q. My Club is listed as being a Charity, how do I fix this? A. The PayPal web site will give you a sub-category of Charity if you say you are a not-for-profit organisation with a sub-category of other. The way out of this is to send an email to compliancedd@paypal.co.uk saying that you are a club and they will manually alter your sub-category to Club. Q. PayPal are asking me for our Clubs Business Number but we haven't got one. What should we do? A. This is another way in which the PayPal process is rather broken. Again the answer is to email compliancedd@paypal.co.uk and explain to them that you are a club and do not have any kind of Business Registration number. Q. My emails to PayPal keep getting returned as not being from the email address on my account. What should I do? A. The answer here is to add your real email address to your account as a secondary or other email. You can do this by logging onto your PayPal account and clicking on Profile. Locate the section for email and click on update. Then add your real email address as a secondary email address. An email address can only be associated with one account at a time so if this email address is on another account you'll have to take it off there first. Q. How long will it take to fully open an Account so the initial limits are raised? A. Allow four weeks if you are careful, determined and lucky. |