Why your budget app keeps disconnecting from your bank, and what to do

Why the connection breaks

Many budget apps don't connect to your bank themselves. They go through a company that sits between the app and the bank, such as Plaid, which says it connects to over 12,000 financial institutions. When a connection needs you to sign in again, Plaid's documentation for app developers lists the usual causes:

• Your sign-in changed. On an older kind of connection, where the app signs in with your username and password, you changed your password or your verification settings.
• Your bank changed how apps connect. It switched to connections you approve on the bank's own site, and you have to sign in again.
• Your permission ran out. The access you approved at your bank expired, or you turned it off.

A connection can also fail for a while because your bank's site has an outage or is down for maintenance. Plaid's advice for that one is to try again later.

How to fix it

1. Sign in on your bank's website, not its mobile app. If you opened the account recently, check that your card is activated, online banking is set up and you've accepted any new terms.
2. Look for a data-sharing setting. Plaid says some banks have one, called something like “Third-Party Sharing”, under Privacy or Security on the website.
3. Check the phone number and email your bank has for you. That's where verification codes go, so an out-of-date number can stop the code reaching you.
4. Reconnect from inside the budget app, using its reconnect or update option, instead of adding the bank a second time. Some banks don't allow two connections to the same app.
5. If it still fails, Plaid suggests contacting your bank or the app's support.

If your bank isn't listed

Plaid says it hasn't reached every bank yet, that new connections take time to build, and that you can ask your bank to contact them. A bank can also be missing from an app's list because that app needs data or features your bank doesn't support. And if Plaid can't keep a reliable connection to a bank, it may take the bank out of its search results for a while, or for good. Plaid's advice is to ask the app whether it has another way to connect.

Skip the bank connection altogether

If you've reconnected before and it broke again, or your app still can't find your bank, you can track spending without a bank connection at all. Most large US banks can email you each time your card is used, once you turn the alert on. Those emails go from your bank straight to your inbox, so there's no connection for an app to lose and no list your bank has to be on.

We built Bankless Budget to work from those emails. You file them under one Gmail label, Google's Gemini AI reads each alert, and the purchase goes into your budget. Here's one purchase, from the alert to the budget:

Nothing in Bankless Budget is set up for a particular bank, so it works with any bank or card that emails an alert for each purchase, including a bank your budget app can't find. We haven't tested every bank's alerts, but an unfamiliar one is read the same way as the Chase alert above.

Our guides walk you through turning on alerts at Chase, Capital One, Wells Fargo, American Express and U.S. Bank, and the Gmail filter that labels them. At another bank, search its help site for “transaction alerts”. The Free plan brings in new purchases when you press Import, and doesn't ask for payment details. On Plus, each purchase is added as its alert arrives. We don't ask for a bank login on either plan.

Before you try it

• It works with Gmail. Your bank's alerts need to arrive in a Gmail account.
• It needs an emailed alert for each purchase. A notification in your bank's app isn't enough.
• It's for the United States only, and budgets count US dollars.

We do have one connection, to your Gmail, and it can stop, for example if you change your Google password. The app then asks you to reconnect, and the alerts that arrived in the meantime are still in Gmail when you do.