Plaid is the standard piping that connects financial apps to banks. Mint, YNAB, Robinhood, Venmo, Chime — they all use it. ReservWise uses it for one thing: pulling in real income events so you don't have to type them.
You don't have to use Plaid. You can run ReservWise with manual entries or with Stripe-only invoice tracking. But if you're earning from a bunch of clients or platforms with different payout cadences, Plaid will save you hours per month.
What we read
From every connected account, ReservWise pulls:
- Account name, type, and last 4 digits (for display).
- Current and available balance (for runway math).
- Transaction history — date, amount, description, merchant when available.
- Plaid's auto-categorization labels (we override most of them).
That's it. We use this to identify income events (positive transactions matching your configured rules) and to reconcile your reserve allocations against actual balances.
What we never store
- Your bank login. Username and password go into Plaid's UI directly — they don't transit our infrastructure.
- Your account or routing numbers in plaintext. We hold a Plaid item token, which can be revoked at any time.
- Card numbers. We don't request the credit-card scope.
- Wire/ACH initiation capability. We don't request the auth or transfer scopes. We literally cannot move money.
Read-only is the entire point. If you ever read something on this site that suggests otherwise, that's a bug — please tell us.
How to connect a bank
- Open Settings → Connections → Add bank.
- Search for your bank and click it. The Plaid modal opens.
- Sign in to your bank inside the Plaid modal. Complete any 2FA your bank prompts for.
- Pick which accounts to share. You can select just your business checking and skip personal accounts.
- Click Continue. Plaid hands ReservWise a token; we sync the last 24 months of transactions in the background (usually under a minute).
You'll see new transactions appear within roughly 5–15 minutes of them clearing your bank, depending on the bank's update cadence to Plaid.
Categorization & income detection
Once connected, ReservWise tries to identify which transactions are income versus refunds, transfers, or noise. We use:
- Plaid's category hints.
- Your income rules (Settings → Income Rules) — match by description regex, amount, source bank, or counterparty.
- Manual confirmation for the first ~5 events from any new payer.
The categorization gets sharper over the first few weeks as you confirm or reject auto-detections. Don't be surprised if the first day is noisy — that's expected and it improves fast.
Disconnecting
Open Settings → Connections, click the bank, and pick Disconnect. ReservWise:
- Revokes the Plaid item immediately.
- Stops pulling new transactions.
- Leaves your historical data intact (you can purge it separately if you want).
You can also revoke from the bank side or from my.plaid.com — your bank-side toggle wins, regardless of what ReservWise has set.
Common issues
- Bank not in the list: some small credit unions and international banks aren't covered. Use manual entries or CSV import for those.
- Connection keeps disconnecting: usually means your bank rotated 2FA. Re-link in Settings → Connections; Plaid will prompt for the new auth.
- Missing transactions: see Troubleshooting → Plaid disconnects & missing transactions.
What to do next
- Set up your income rules so the right transactions get tagged as income on day one.
- Read Setting up your first six reserves if you haven't already.
- If anything about data handling looks off, read Security or email us.
Live data isn't optional once you've felt how good it is. The hour you save every week is the whole point.