Paypals confusing currency conversion

hubb

I have been paid in us dollars for years via paypal with the currency automatically converted into uk pounds. No problem except you always got a bit lower rate than the going.

Now i get paid in dollars and have to convert this myself with then confusing converter. The only way to get a conversion from dollars to pounds is to in fact to select pounds to dollars. If you select dollars to pounds it converts as if pounds to dollars. I know. Its topsy turvy but this is the only way it works for me. A also cant track each payment (company) individually for my accounts so i have no way of telling how much each company has paid me. Its hard to describe here but thats the best i can do as paypal's help and forums come unanswered except for a stock email with lists and lists of pre written answers.

Anyone else find this frustrating ? Even more annoying is if dollars were converted to pounds and then pounds to dollars by mistake resulting in diminished returns when converted back to pounds again.

hubb

No help here then :-(

Gromitt

Doesn't work like that for me.

A typical transaction this week works out as follows:

Payment From xxx $300 USD
Fee -$13.50
Currency conversion $286.50
Currency conversion £173.81

then underneath all the details it says the exchange rate. Don't have to anything myself.

It sounds to me like you have opted to create a USD balance, and then of course you have to manually convert each time, but at least then you can wait for a decent exchange rate before converting.

hubb

Never like that ever for me. As soon as payment came through it was always automatically converted to UK pounds immediate.