Connecting a bank account

Connecting a bank account means your transactions arrive on their own instead of being typed in from a statement. The product then suggests what each one matches — an expense, an invoice payment, some other income — and you confirm.

This needs Professional. Each connected account is something the banking provider charges us for per month.

Connect an account

Under Settings → Bank Accounts, connect a bank or credit card account through Plaid, which is the service your bank recognizes and which never hands us your banking password.

Once connected, transactions import automatically.

Sort each transaction

Every imported transaction ends up in exactly one state. You decide which:

• An expense — money out, matched to an expense record.
• An invoice payment — money in against an invoice you raised.
• Other income — money in that is not against an invoice.
• Ignored — a transfer between your own accounts, or something that is just not business.

The product suggests; you decide. Nothing is ever classified without you confirming it. An automated guess that silently attaches a $2,000 payment to the wrong invoice is worse than no automation at all.

Understand two rules that keep the books honest

These trip people up, and both are deliberate:

• An invoice payment is not income. It reduces what you are owed; it does not create revenue. The revenue was recognized when you raised the invoice. Counting both would double your income.
• A transaction matches at most one business record. No splitting one bank line across two expenses, because a one-to-one match is the only kind that can be reconciled with confidence later.

Know what a bank transaction is and is not

Imported transactions are never modified or deleted. They are the record of what your bank said, and they stay exactly as they arrived. What changes is the business record you attached to them.

Jobs are business context, not bank context. You do not assign a bank transaction to a job — you assign the expense to the job, and the transaction is matched to that expense. The bank does not know what a job is, and pretending it does is how reconciliations stop reconciling.