You’re right Paul. PayPal is indeed the best way of checking. I thought HubPages was accurate, but I just compared my HP Balance History monthly payments to PayPal’s receipts for March and April last year.
For some weird reason HubPages shows “Finalized PayPal Payment on Apr 20” for the March 28th balance. However, when I looked at PayPal, the correct amount was received on March 28th. There was no delay last year at this time! Just the history statement was wrong. Thanks to you, I examined that more carefully.
Reviewing other years, I noticed a 1 to 3 day delay once in a while, just as you said. And it seems to happen only once a year. So that's no big deal.