Connect your first bank

Seeing comes first. Connecting your bank brings what you’ve been entrusted with into one ledger, where you can keep watch over it. “Know well the state of your flocks, and pay attention to your herds.” (Proverbs 27:23, WEB)

Start on Home. The setup guide there opens with Connect a bank — a window from Plaid opens, you search for your institution, and you sign in there. When it finishes you land back on Home, with a note saying which accounts arrived and what to do next.

Later on, when you are adding a second or third bank, the same button lives on Settings → Bank Connections under the name Add new bank. That page is where you manage connections you already have.

Your credentials go to Plaid, not to us. We never see them and have nothing to store. What we receive back is a key that reads that one institution’s data, which we encrypt before saving.

What arrives

• Your accounts at that institution, with their balances.
• The last 90 days of transactions. Not your whole history — 90 days is what we request, and it’s enough to build a budget from.
• For cards and loans, the rate and minimum payment where your bank reports them. That’s what makes the payoff math run on real numbers instead of ones you typed in.

If your bank is not listed

Plaid supports most US institutions but not all of them, and coverage changes. You can still track the account — see Adding accounts and debts by hand. A hand-entered account behaves like any other everywhere except that nothing arrives in it automatically.

A household with two logins at one bank

That’s two connections, not one, and it’s meant to be. If you and your Spouse each have your own login at the same institution, connect both — the app counts connections, not banks, and two at one institution is completely normal. What matters is that everything the household has been given ends up where you can see it.