Need to separate fee and contribution with paypal standard

[P a u l]

Using paypal standard and there is a problem. We would like to have separate transactions or line items for membership fees and contributions made on the membership sign up form. Right now the treasurer is asking me why the fee and the contribution are lumped together at the paypal account. I have no answer for them.

To try and fix this I have copied the original contribution page to a test page with these settings:

"Execute real-time monetary transactions" is checked in the Amount tab.
"Separate Membership Payment" is checked in Memberships tab.
"Require Membership Signup" is checked in Memberships tab.

But can't load the page to test it due to this error:

Sorry but we are not able to provide this at the moment.
This contribution page is configured to support separate contribution and membership payments. This PayPal_Standard plugin does not currently support multiple simultaneous payments, or the option to "Execute real-time monetary transactions" is disabled. Please contact the site administrator and notify them of this error

Is there any way to fix this? Why would I want separate payments where additional line items would work better anyway? I suppose there is no provision for line items feedback to CiviCRM?

[JonGold]

This can't be fixed with an off-site processor, because of how off-site processors work.  For you to separate the two charges, you would have to submit the charges to the payment processor separately.  For an on-site processor (PayPal Pro, Authorize.Net, etc.) this is no problem; you simply submit two charges, and it all happens transparently for the user.

However, for an off-site processor, each time you submit a payment, you send the payor off-site.  You can't submit two payments without sending the person off-site twice.  This would be onerous and undesirable. 

tl;dr: If this is important to your treasurer, you should encourage them to upgrade to an on-site processor.

[sonicthoughts]

Just a heads up-  I have had a lot of trouble extracting dependable fee data from PaypalPro (offline).