Bank Connect

Connect your bank accounts and automatically sync transactions

Connecting an Institution

Vibe Ledger uses Plaid Link to securely connect to your financial institutions. Click "Connect Institution" from the Bank Connect page, then sign into your bank in the Plaid popup. Plaid supports checking accounts, savings accounts, credit cards, and investment accounts.

Account Mapping

After connecting an institution, you need to map each bank account to a ledger account. The system suggests matching account types automatically -- for example, a credit card maps to a liability account and a depository account maps to an asset account. You can create new ledger accounts inline during this step or map to existing accounts in your chart of accounts.

Syncing Transactions

Click "Sync" to pull the latest transactions from your connected institutions. The system uses cursor-based incremental sync, meaning only new and modified transactions are fetched on each sync. Transactions that have been removed by the bank (e.g., pending charges that were reversed) are automatically cleaned up from the ledger.

Auto-Import

Synced transactions are automatically imported into the ledger as double-entry journal entries. The categorization engine assigns each transaction to an appropriate expense or revenue account using your category rules and AI. Transactions that the system is not confident about are sent to the Review Queue for manual review.

Credit Card Payments

The system automatically detects credit card payments -- negative amounts on liability accounts -- and routes them correctly as: DR Credit Card, CR Cash. Credit card payments are not counted as revenue. This ensures your income statement reflects actual revenue only.

Investment Accounts

If your institution supports investments, you can add the investments product to your Plaid connection to sync holdings (positions, current prices, unrealized gains) and investment transactions (buys, sells, dividends). This data integrates with the Crypto & Tax Lots module for comprehensive portfolio tracking.

Duplicate Prevention

The dedup system prevents the same transaction from being imported twice, even if it was already imported from a PDF bank statement. Deduplication matches on date (+-1 day tolerance), amount, and description similarity. This means you can safely use both Plaid sync and PDF Import for the same accounts without worrying about double-counting.