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I volunteer for a nonprofit which accepts donations via Paypal. My job is to log into the Paypal account, note down the particulars about a donation (name, date,amount, etc), populate those fields in a template receipt stored in Google drive, download a pdf of the receipt created, and use the nonprofit's Gmail account to send the donor a confirmation/thank you mail, with the generated receipt as attachment.

Is there a way to automate this whole process and make it instantaneous? This will be cool (and will save me quite a bit of labor). If there is no specific answer, do you have any general path I can follow? Also, if we move from PayPal to, say, a bank, can the same thing be done?

I only know bash programming and Fortran, but I may be able to learn what's needed to do this job.

thanks for reading my question!

Soham Ghosh
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Yes. You would use Instant Payment Notification (IPN) for that.

Basically, you create a script that sits on your web server and "listens" for data. Any time a transaction hits your PayPal account their server will POST all of the data about that transaction to your listener script.

Your script receives the data, and within it you can process the data however you need to. You can generate customized email receipts like you've mentioned, update databases, hit 3rd party web services, etc. It happens automatically and in real-time.

It's an extremely valuable tool that will let you automate tasks based on payments, refunds, disputes, etc.

Drew Angell
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    Are you using WordPress, by chance? If so, I'd recommend installing the [PayPal IPN for WordPress plugin](https://wordpress.org/plugins/paypal-ipn/). – Drew Angell Jun 23 '15 at 09:38