If you use PayPal to accept credit cards for your small business (eBay, Etsy, e-store, freelance, etc), you may not want to keep your money sitting at PayPal (especially if you are earning higher interest in your bank account). There is a feature called Auto Sweep that checks daily and automatically “sweeps” any money that arrives in your PayPal account into your bank account overnight.
The Auto Sweep feature used to be easily found in their settings. Then they moved it into a dim corner of their website that was harder to find. Last week, I couldn’t find it at all. After digging through several outdated articles, it turns out that as of 2018 you can’t access the feature at all unless you call in and ask for it explicitly. Not exactly customer-friendly behavior, but PayPal makes money off your idle balances… (The PayPal Money Market fund that offered higher interest shut down in July 2011.)
Here’s how to enable Auto Sweep on your PayPal account as of 2018. This is another post for the benefit for others searching online. First, make sure you meet these requirements:
- You must have a Business PayPal account in good standing.
- You must have a bank account linked to your PayPal account.
- You must have lifted your withdrawal limit and verified your PayPal Account.
Next, you must call PayPal directly via phone.
- Once logged into your PayPal account click Contact at the bottom of the page.
- Choose the Call Us option and call the number listed for your account. Use the unique code to quickly identify yourself to them.
- When you reach a human, explicitly ask for “Auto Sweep” to be enabled on your account.
After that, they will flip a switch on their end, and you should finally be able to see the option enabled on your online account. Log back into your PayPal account and follow these instructions:
- Click Profile beside “Log Out” and select Profile and settings.
- Click My money.
- Click Set near “Automatic transfers.”
- Click Edit.
- Click Yes, select the bank you want your money transferred to, and click Save.
Here’s what you should see after Auto Sweep has successfully been turned on:
There you go. Note that if you ever manually request a cash transfer from a bank account to your PayPal balance, that this would automatically turn off Auto Sweep. I guess the money running around in circles causes a tear in the time-space continuum or something. (You can go back an turn Auto Sweep back on manually.)
If you activate this feature, it may also change your how you use the PayPal Business Debit card, as there will no longer be any cash balance in your account to draw from. For non-PIN signature purchases, these will still work if you first link a bank account as a backup source, and then the debit card charges will pull from your designated backup source. You can also link up certain PayPal credit cards (source), but not just any credit card as backup. For ATM withdrawals, you will not be able to make ATM withdrawals with a zero PayPal balance (source).
I wouldn’t really recommend using the debit card anyway, there are much better small business card options with no annual fee.
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Great value-added article Johnathan. It reminds me the quicker you get your money the quicker it can work for you.
It might sound simple to some, but there are still many people that don’t know how to enable auto sweep in Paypal so this article will help others. Thanks, Jonathan!
I did all this and called Paypal etc but the Automatic Transfers option didn’t show up even after logging out and in again. The Paypal person said this is a known problem, and the solution was to open up a new tab once you’re logged into Paypal and go to http://www.paypal.com/autosweep. I did that and everything worked as expected, but even after logging out and in again, I still don’t see the Automatic Transfers option. Not a big problem since I don’t think I’ll need to change it very often.
Spoke to Paypal today and they have removed this feature completely now according to them. If anyone know any different please let me know!
That is not true.
Thanks Jonathan.
Unfortunately, this is a different feature than that for which I’ve been searching in futility. Do you know where to go in one’s PayPal account to find out if monthly automatic transfers of available funds are enabled? This appears to be another feature which used to be easy to find and has recently been moved to a dim corner of PayPal’s website.
I know I enabled it a few years ago, because I have old emails from PayPal notifying me of automatic transfers to my Visa debit card. But last month (on November 30th, to be precise) a bit less than $10 USD was paid to my PayPal account, and I expected it to be automatically transferred to my card on December 1st. But it didn’t happen, and that money is still sitting in PayPal, and marked as available. It’s actually all the money I currently have in my PayPal account. To your knowledge, is there a threshold below which monthly automatic transfers don’t occur? (Perhaps $10 USD is the minimum?)
Thanks in advance.
To the best of my knowledge that feature used to exist, but does not exist any longer. It is possible that you were grandfathered for a certain period.
Don’t wast your time, IT DOES NOT WORK ANYMORE!
–> Just tried to contact them (called from Austria) … and after 30-40mins hanging on the phone they refused to activate AUTO SWEEP for my business account, as they said *they’re going to activate it only for businesses with at least €15,000 monthly revenue in the future*. The guy on the phone told me that with smaller merchants they had only problems and most wanted to opt-out after 2 weeks again anyways. PayPal simply doesn’t want people to access this feature anymore.
Maybe this helps someone.
That is not true.
I can confirm this still works. I just enabled it for both our US and Canadian businesses. Thanks for the tip!
They told me it doesn’t work for Australia. If someone has something different let me know
Just called and had them set this up for our U.S account, no problems….took about 4 minutes. Thanks for the informative article.
I’m in California and just called them. It took them less than 5 minutes to set it up for my business account. Once they ‘flip some switches’ on their end, they’ll then have you log into your Paypal account, go to SETTINGS > Money, banks and cards; and then click on Automatic Transfers to enable Auto Sweep.
I emailed PayPal to set this up and received a response to phone PayPal to assess whether my account is eligible for auto-sweep. I then spent 55 minutes on the phone to PayPal – Initially speaking to customer service (in the Philippines I assume) who assessed my account and after 40 minutes checking with supervisors etc. advised they could switch it on and needed to transfer me to someone else to complete set up. I was then transferred to what sounded like a US customer service department who immediately notified me without checking my account this feature is not available for anyone anymore. If you had it set up in the past it will apparently still be enabled but they are not enabling it for any new accounts. Their reasoning to decommission this feature is because of fraudulent activities, but I suspect it’s so they sit on customers money longer. Absolute pain in the ass manually withdrawing from PayPal daily!
That is not true. It is still available.
dont west your time not working now
That is not true.
Don’t waste your time. I spoke to them. They say you need $$,$$$s in your account transacting over a month-by-month period to be eligible for this. You can’t “just request” it.
That is not true.