The Scenario
You are a business owner. You switched billing systems six months ago. You still have 80 stale PayPal draft invoices that were never sent and never deleted — they sit in your PayPal drafts folder cluttering up searches and reports. Your invoice IDs are in a Google Sheet. You want them gone before your bookkeeper runs next month's reconciliation.
The slow version:
- Open PayPal's invoicing dashboard, filter to Drafts
- Find invoice 1 by ID, open it, click the three-dot menu, delete, confirm
- Repeat 79 more times
- Get a timeout error halfway through and lose your place in the list
- Forty-five minutes later, you have deleted 31 invoices.
The fast version is one prompt.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your spreadsheet that reads the invoice ID list and deletes each draft from PayPal without you opening the dashboard.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
Delete every PayPal invoice whose ID is in column A of this sheet. They are all drafts that are no longer needed. Write the deletion status into column B for each row.
SheetXAI iterates through the IDs, calls PayPal's invoice delete endpoint for each one, and logs the result. Eighty deletions in the time it would have taken you to do twelve by hand.
What You Get
A clean PayPal drafts folder and a logged outcome for each row:
- Column B populated — "DELETED" or an error message for each invoice ID
- Dashboard uncluttered — all 80 stale drafts removed
- Audit trail in the sheet — you have a record of what was deleted, when the prompt ran, and any IDs that did not resolve
Your bookkeeper runs reconciliation against a clean list. Stale drafts do not show up as phantom open balances.
If an ID is not found — because someone already deleted it manually — SheetXAI logs "NOT FOUND" in column B rather than failing the whole batch.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Cleanup lists are rarely perfectly curated. SheetXAI handles the edge cases inline.
When some IDs in the list might already be sent, not draft
You are not 100% sure every ID in the sheet is still a draft. You do not want to accidentally delete a sent invoice.
For each invoice ID in column A, check the invoice status in PayPal before deleting. Only delete if the status is DRAFT. If the status is anything else, write that status into column B and skip the deletion. For deleted ones, write "DELETED."
When the sheet has blank rows that should be skipped
The sheet was assembled from multiple exports and has some blank cells in column A.
For each row in this sheet, skip if column A is blank. For all others, delete the PayPal draft invoice at that ID and write "DELETED" or the error message into column B.
When you want to delete only invoices older than a certain date
The cleanup is targeted — only drafts created before January 1, 2025 should be removed.
For each invoice ID in column A, look up the invoice in PayPal and check its created date. Only delete if the invoice was created before January 1, 2025 and its status is DRAFT. Write the outcome into column B.
When you need a pre-deletion summary before committing
You want to see what would be deleted before actually deleting anything.
For each invoice ID in column A, fetch the invoice details from PayPal and write into columns B, C, and D: the status, the total amount, and the recipient email. Do not delete anything yet. I will review the list and tell you which rows to proceed with.
The pattern: specify conditions, get status back per row, and handle the edge cases without touching the PayPal dashboard at all.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any sheet with stale PayPal invoice IDs, then ask it to delete the drafts. The PayPal integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. See also how to bulk-update draft invoices from corrected data or the PayPal in Google Sheets overview.