About Plaid, our North America data provider

Plaid is our data provider for connecting to banks within North America. We are still early in our integration with Plaid; however, user feedback has been very positive! Plaid allows us to offer more reliable feeds, and they will make Open Banking feeds available to us where possible.

This user guide outlines how to get started and what to expect when switching to Plaid.

Switching to a Plaid feed

If you've been experiencing issues with North America-based feeds provided by our data provider Yodlee, we'd like to invite you to try connecting via our new data provider, Plaid, if they are able to offer an alternative feed.

Some Plaid feeds, such as Chase (US), are now openly available for our users to add themselves via the Feeds page (Manage > Feeds). If your bank is not yet openly available, the PocketSmith Support Team can manually add Plaid feeds to your PocketSmith account. Please reach out via ? > Get help from PocketSmith's main navigation menu, and let us know if you'd like to try using Plaid!

If you're unsure which data provider is providing your current feed, please head to the Feeds page (Manage > Feeds), and click the three-dot menu on the affected feed. 

Authorizing your Plaid feed and linking your accounts

Once you have your Plaid feed available, you can start authorizing this new feed by heading to the Feeds page (Manage > Feeds), finding your new Plaid feed, and selecting AUTHORIZE. 

You will then be taken to the  Plaid interface pop-up window. Follow the prompts to authorize your feed via Plaid.

Once you step through the authorization process, you'll be guided back to PocketSmith to link your existing accounts to the new Plaid feed.

If you have been using another data provider previously for this feed, your existing accounts should be automatically selected to be linked to your new Plaid feed accounts. You should just need to confirm they're correct and click SUBMIT. You can find an illustrated guide for this here: Linking feed accounts to existing accounts.

After you've relinked your accounts in PocketSmith, you'll be all set, and your recent transactions will appear ✨

Automatic and manual syncing on your Plaid feed

Plaid feeds will automatically sync in the background, roughly every 24 to 48 hours after you make a transaction on one of the accounts on the feed. If you notice that your Plaid feed has not synced within 48 hours, please refer to Importing new Transactions via Plaid. Unlike some data providers, Plaid's automatic syncing cannot be disabled.

There is also a manual "Sync now" button to trigger a sync as you would with our other data providers. This will not trigger Plaid to fetch data directly from the bank, as Plaid manage that on their own schedule with their regular automatic syncs. Instead, a manual sync checks that all data in PocketSmith is up-to-date with what is stored at Plaid from their most recent automatic sync.

Importing new Transactions via Plaid

The  Last successful sync shown on a feed will update when Plaid has found new transactions that are ready to be imported into PocketSmith. So, if no recent transactions have occurred within the account, you won't see the successful sync time change with Plaid feeds.

We understand that you should see transactions appear in PocketSmith  within 24 hours of the transaction occurring. Our observations have been that transactions appear much, much quicker than 24 hours, too.

If you have transactions that occurred over 48 hours ago that have not been automatically imported by the feed, please reach out via  ? >  Feed help from PocketSmith's main navigation menu. We'll require a screenshot from  your bank's online banking site that shows the transactions that have not been imported into PocketSmith to then open a service request with Plaid.

Updating merchant names for Filters and Category Rules

If you have previously been connecting to this bank via Yodlee, you may notice that the imported transaction descriptions differ from those Yodlee provided. You may need to tweak Category Rules and Filters to accommodate these changes. We're keen for feedback on whether transaction descriptions are complete for you.

Unsupported Account Types

Some account types (such as Investment accounts) may not be available via Plaid - though regular transactional accounts will. We are also looking to resolve this in the future but cannot provide a timeframe.

Troubleshooting Plaid feeds

On occasion, feeds encounter errors that are beyond our control. Errors are not commonplace, but unfortunately, they do happen!

For most issues, our data provider, Plaid, has let us know that the best solution to get everything syncing again will be to reauthorize the feed.

To reauthorize, please head to the Feeds page (Manage > Feeds), click the three-dot menu on the affected feed, and select Edit authorization. From there, you'll be taken to Plaid to reauthorize, and once completed, everything should start syncing again.

If your error persists, please just reach out via  ? > Feed help from PocketSmith's main navigation menu with details of the error you've encountered and the steps you've already followed. Please avoid removing the Plaid feed.