Dev mass payment

[John Pugh]

Currently payments via paypal to developers require manual entry for each payment.

Paypal has a mass payment feature https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_batch-payment-overview-outside

Would like to have this option enabled for Q2FY2013 (ending Sept 2012) payments.

Need to investigate generating the mass payment report option for finance to verify and input for payment.

[Anthony Lenton (elachuni)]

Discussed the scope a bit further:
 - What's needed is MyApps to generate a batch file that could then be manually uploaded to PayPal to fire off the whole set of payments. The format for the report that should be generated is specified in the URL in the description.
 - This *doesn't* involve talking to the PayPal API or triggering the payments unattended.
 - There seems to be a limit of 250 developers per uploaded file. MyApps should generate multiple files (and provide them in a zipfile, or email them all to finance like it does with the ISV sales reports) if necessary.
 - This feature could be available from the sales_report page, and include the same range of dates that's used for generating sales and finance reports.

[Anthony Lenton (elachuni)]

One thing that would need to be added is some way of tracking when the last time a payment was issued for a developer.
It would probably be safe to assume that the money that's due immediately after a payment is made is $0, so the next payment can add up sales made after that date.

It would be safer to have a decimal field that can contain any amount that's due for any other reason. Possibly a charfield to go with it to add as a comment for the amount due in sales / ISV reports. jpugh, do you think something like this would be necessary? It might be hard to explain in the books if there's an arbitrary amount paid out to the developer, so this might hinder more than it helps.

[Anthony Lenton (elachuni)]

After discussing with jpugh, let's not add any of what's suggested in comment #2.

The mass payment report can be generated like the sales report is generated, by specifying a span of dates. The resulting csv will then be reviewed by finance to amend any necessary special cases, so it won't be necessary to track payment dates within sca itself.