Plaid pulls your bank transactions every few hours and categorizes them automatically. ReservWise then matches each deposit against your pipeline so a Confirmed line you logged earlier flips to "Received." Most of the time the chain is silent and accurate. The reconcile view exists for the times it is not.
Opening the reconcile view
Open Income → Reconcile. You will see three tabs:
- Needs review — deposits Plaid imported that ReservWise could not auto-match to a pipeline line.
- Possible duplicates — deposits that look suspiciously like another one already on the books.
- Missing expected — pipeline lines that should have arrived by now but have not.
The number badge on each tab tells you how much human attention is waiting. A clean reconcile view shows zeros across all three.
Working the Needs Review tab
Each row is a deposit Plaid pulled but ReservWise could not confidently link to a pipeline line or to a recurring stream. For each one, you have four actions:
- Match to pipeline — pick an existing Confirmed or Likely line. The line gets marked Received and the deposit is linked.
- Log as new income — create a new income record on the fly. Useful for one-off payments you never logged in the pipeline.
- Tag as non-income — interest, internal transfer, refund, loan proceeds. The deposit stays in the bank record but stops counting as income.
- Split — a single deposit covers multiple invoices or mixes income with a refund. Split into multiple lines, each with its own category.
Possible Duplicates tab
Most duplicates come from two sources: (a) a Stripe payout arriving 2 days after you already logged the underlying invoice as paid, or (b) a Plaid webhook flap that re-imports a transaction. ReservWise flags any deposit that matches another within $5 and 7 days.
For each flagged pair, you can:
- Confirm duplicate — merge the two records, keeping the most recent.
- Confirm distinct — they happen to look alike but are real separate payments. The system learns and stops flagging similar pairs.
Missing Expected tab
Pipeline lines marked Confirmed with an expected date in the past but no matching deposit show up here. Three actions:
- Slip the date — push the expected date forward when the client says "next week" again.
- Mark received late — link the line to a deposit that arrived after the expected date.
- Mark lost — the deal died after being Confirmed. Rare but happens. The line stops contributing to historical income.
When categorization is wrong
Plaid sometimes labels income as "Transfer" or labels a refund as "Income." Open any deposit and click the category — you can pick a different one from a dropdown. Two important behaviors:
- Single change vs rule. Changing one transaction is a one-off. Click Make a rule to teach the system that any future deposit from this source should use the new category.
- Rules apply forward. Creating a rule does not retroactively re-categorize old transactions. Use the Re-categorize matching button after creating a rule if you want it applied historically.
Building durable categorization rules
Open Settings → Income rules to see and edit your active rules. Each rule has:
- A matcher (substring of the bank description, exact source, or amount range).
- A category (Income / Refund / Transfer / Loan / Other).
- A source label (auto-populates the source field on matched deposits).
- An optional auto-match to recurring flag for retainers.
Stripe deposits and the 2-day lag
Stripe payouts land 2 business days after the customer pays. ReservWise knows this and matches the payout against the underlying invoice rather than re-counting the payment. If you ever see a Stripe payout in Needs Review, the most common cause is a payout containing fees or refunds that change the dollar amount — split the deposit into the gross + fee components and the underlying invoice match works.
Common mistakes to avoid
- Logging the same payment twice. If you marked an invoice paid manually and then Plaid imports the deposit, use Match to pipeline — do not log it as new income.
- Tagging refunds as income. Refunds are returned money — they should net out the original expense, not show up as new revenue.
- Letting Needs Review pile up. Once it crosses 30+ items, every reconcile session becomes painful. Stay current.
- Auto-matching everything. Aggressive auto-match rules can match a real Acme deposit to a different client's Acme-named line. Use specific matchers.
- Marking Confirmed lines lost when they are just late. Slip the date instead. Marking lost permanently removes the line from your pipeline conversion data.
What to do next
- Open Income → Reconcile and clear any pending Needs Review items.
- Build a categorization rule for your most common recurring deposit (a retainer, a payout) so it auto-categorizes next time.
- Read Connecting Plaid to track real income for how Plaid sync is wired.
- Read Pipeline view: managing expected income for how Confirmed lines feed the reconcile flow.
Reconciliation is not bookkeeping busywork. It is how the forecast stays trustworthy enough to make decisions against.