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Why Is My PayPal Payment "Pending" In Bonsai?
Why Is My PayPal Payment "Pending" In Bonsai?

PayPal pending payment: Reasons and 4 ways to avoid it with Bonsai.

Updated over a week ago

PayPal's payment system has many little quirks, one of them being the well-known PayPal "Pending" payment status.

If your PayPal payment on an invoice template is stuck with the status "Your Payment is Processing", then it is usually one of two things:

  • The payment is simply taking a few days to process because PayPal is reviewing it for fraud.  Though somewhat unusual, PayPal can take a few days to review and process the payment.  If they think the payment is likely fraudulent, they'll also send the money back.

  • The contractor on the invoice needs to claim/accept the payment in their PayPal dashboard.  Their payment is unclaimed to PayPal and if not updated within 30 days will be sent back to the client.

If you don't have a Bonsai account yet, sign up for the free trial now and start managing your PayPal payments and invoices using Bonsai.

Four ways to avoid issues with PayPal Payments

  • Make sure your PayPal account is in the same currency as the currency on your invoices.

  • Make sure your Payment Receiving Preferences on PayPal is not set to manually accepting payments or automatically denying payments from senders without an address.

  • Verify your PayPal account.

  • Avoid making changes to your PayPal account email address.


Still having issues and the payment seems "stuck"?  Our other article related to PayPal may explain the reason.

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