Where are my scheduled reports?

[larsicus]

Like a lot of other sellers, I am dumbfounded by eBay's 90-day data retention for past sales. In the past, I could use PayPal's records to do my annual review for taxes and planning, but with Managed Payments I am now completely at the mercy of eBay to get this information.  I was glad to discover "scheduled reports" in the Seller Hub, and assumed that this was the tool that would allow me to save the information I needed to accurately report income and expenses from eBay sales.

I scheduled a report for paid and shipped items, and noted at the end of the month that the report appeared as expected.  Today, to my horror, I returned to the page to find that only the past month's report is available. 

What's going on here? Where are my reports? 

[slippinjimmy]

@larsicus 

If you want the full year (2021) you need to run a Transaction Report (Reports section of the Payments Tab).

That report goes back at least 18 months and you can run a report for a full year in one shot.

[kds99]

I think this was the report I ran more than a month ago, with eBay saying it would be sent to me in a month. Have not been notified yet. Does this sound normal?

[monica-sells]

You are doing something wrong....

All the reports you need are there, and they are even more comprehensive than Paypal reports were.....

[monica-sells]

not normal...takes a minimal amount of time to generate reports

ebay says nothing, it is all automated from your input/request

[larsicus]

Thanks, that's certainly helpful, and gives me some of the information I need, however it's not the same as the scheduled reports.

[larsicus]

Do you have scheduled reports set up and have multiple historical reports available for download?  

There aren't options about delivery, retention, or notification of reports. Pretty much all of the variables are in the contents of the reports, so if I'm "doing something wrong" then it's hard to see where I had the choice to do it right. 

[dbfolks166mt]

     All the information you need to do your taxes is available for you to pull. You cannot expect eBay to produce those individual reports for the millions of sellers there are on eBay. There are multiple options for getting the data you need but I utilize, from the seller hub, the Payments, Reports function. I run the transaction report putting in the start date of 1/1/2021 and the end date of 12/31/2021. The report takes a few minutes to run and eBay will notify you when it is ready to download. The file is in CSV format but can be easily opened and then saved as an EXCEL spreadsheet. 

     The spreadsheet has an excessive amount of data that you can rack and stack in whatever format you find easiest to work with. I personally create several tabs in the spreadsheet and separate out the revenues and expenses. 

[larsicus]

OK, the Transaction Report CSV is helpful and is a big part of the information I wanted, specifically for taxes.  Thank you to the respondents who pointed it out; eBay is a complex site and it's easy to forget about features.

However, transaction reports are not the feature that I was referring to.  Perhaps I was not clear enough in my original question.  There is a feature called "Scheduled Reports" under the "Reports" tab of the Seller Hub, where you can schedule an Orders report.  I scheduled reports to be generated monthly, but it appears that if I don't download them, they are discarded automatically. 

The Orders reports contain other information (such as postal tracking and phone numbers) that  is not available elsewhere.

[jda08121]

So download them. EBay does not have the bandwidth to save everything for everyone. I am notified of the reports monthly but there is TMI there for me to keep all that data.

[monica-sells]

my apologies.....I did not notice you were referring to "those" reports (scheduled)

I was not aware they deleted them after a designated time....

if that information is available there, I would think it would also be available from the .csv file that contains many columns of information.....all these are headings from a full report....

Transaction creation date|Type|Order number| Legacy order ID |Buyer username| Buyer name| Ship to city| Ship to province/region/state |Ship to zip| Ship to country |Net amount |Payout currency |Payout date| Payout ID |Payout method| Status| Reason for hold| Item ID |Transaction ID| Item title| Custom label| Quantity |Item subtotal| Shipping and handling| Seller collected tax |eBay collected tax| Final Value Fee - fixed| Final Value Fee - variable |Very high item not as described" fee" |Below standard performance fee| International fee| Gross transaction amount |Transaction currency| Exchange rate |Reference ID| Description

[dbfolks166mt]

About the only thing that is not in the transaction report, that I can think of, is the buyers phone number. In the 20+ years I have been selling on eBay I have never needed a buyers phone number for any reason.