Accounts & Transactions

All of your financial accounts live on the Accounts page, both those synced through Plaid and those you add manually.

Accounts are grouped into two sections:

• Asset accounts — what your business owns or holds, such as checking, savings, and investment accounts.
• Liability accounts — what your business owes, such as credit cards and loans.

For synced accounts with transaction history, the Accounts page shows important status details in the Transaction History column:

• Transaction History — the earliest-to-latest date range of history available in BudgetBadger. A green check means you have 6+ months of history, which is ideal for reports and analyses (P&L trends and analytics), but not required. An amber exclamation mark means history is <6 months. We request about two years of history when you connect with Plaid, though the transaction history that is actually received depends on each financial institution and may be less than two years.
• Last synced — the most recent date BudgetBadger successfully refreshed that account from Plaid. Posted transactions typically refresh about every six hours after the first sync.
• Last reconciled — appears only when Match Bank Statements is turned on in Settings, and only for eligible Plaid checking, savings, and credit accounts. It shows the end date of your last completed statement match or your current status for that account.

When your Last synced account status is stale, new transactions stop appearing, or BudgetBadger asks you to reconnect a bank, you may need to reconnect an account on the Accounts page to resume syncing.

Here are some helpful tips to ensure your accounts are syncing properly:

1. On the Accounts page, all non-manual accounts should display "Synced" in the Sync Status column. If an account needs to be reconnected, it will display a red Reconnect button, which prompts the proper reconnection workflow. Do not remove and re-add the same institution unless support directs you to.
2. Posted transactions normally refresh about every six hours after the first sync and only sync Posted (not Pending) transactions, so there may be a slight delay of up to a few days from your transaction date before it appears in BudgetBadger; wait for Last synced to update before assuming failure.
3. Some institutions or account types (for example certain investments) return little or no transaction history by design, even when properly synced.
4. Manual accounts never auto-sync. You will need to edit balances and add transactions yourself.

If you are having trouble with the account syncing processes, feel free to reach out to support on the Contact page.

On the Accounts page, choose Add Account → Add Manual Account to create a new asset or liability account. Balances on manual accounts update only when you edit them, since they do not sync from a bank.

To edit account details (type, balance, and other fields), click the account row to open the edit screen. To rename an account, you can simply click its name directly on the Accounts page.

Manual accounts are also useful for historical CSV imports that sit beside (not on top of) your live synced accounts. See Importing Historical Transactions From CSV for more details.

New synced transactions appear in blue on the Transactions page. It is important to review them, especially when you are first setting up your BudgetBadger account and automated categorization processes (like category rules), so your transaction categorizations and thus your P&L reports are accurate and consistent.

There are a number of ways to set transactions as "Viewed", which clears the blue state (blue dot and light blue background):

1. Click the blue dot on the left side of the transaction row.
2. Change the category, either by using the category dropdown or one of the other recategorization processes.
3. Click the Mark All Viewed button in the blue bar at the top of the Transactions page.
4. Split a transaction, which will automatically mark the transaction as reviewed.

You can also filter the Transactions page to only show newly synced, unreviewed transactions by pressing the Review button in the blue bar at the top of the Transactions page.

The Bulk Assign feature helps you quickly recategorize large batches of similar transactions faster than editing rows one at a time, and is a one-off alternative to the category rules process.

Suggested workflow:

1. On the Transactions page, use the filters at the top of the page to focus the list. For example, use the Merchant search bar to filter transactions for a specific merchant.
2. Use the select all or row checkboxes on the filtered list, press the green Assign button, and choose the correct category.

See How Transactions Get Categorized and Category Rules Explained.

On the Transactions page, use the green Add button to manually add a transaction to an account, and fill in the details on the Input tab. Transactions are added one by one using this process, and additional transactions can be added by pressing the Add button again on the Transactions page.

To edit a manual transaction later, open the row actions menu (three dots) on the right side of the row and choose Edit Manual Transaction. You can also delete manual rows from that same menu.

Synced Plaid transactions cannot be deleted, but they can be excluded from P&L reports by categorizing them to an Excluded from P&L category (e.g. Transfers).

If you have a lot of historical transactions that you would like to bring over to your BudgetBadger Business account that cannot be synced on the Accounts page, you may upload a CSV file in a specified format to manually import transactions into BudgetBadger.

Navigate to the Transactions page, press the green Add button, and then go to the Upload CSV tab.

You must then choose which account you want to import the transactions into. You must have already created a manual account on the Accounts page for this to work. Synced accounts are not allowed for CSV imports, since that may result in duplicate transactions or other unexpected behavior.

As indicated on the Upload CSV tab, your CSV file must include the following columns in row 1: Date, Merchant, Outflow, and Inflow.

A downloadable CSV template is available on the Upload CSV tab as a starter file.

The following formatting rules must be followed for the CSV import to work properly:

• Date — must be historical (not in the future) and in a recognizable date format (for example YYYY-MM-DD or MM/DD/YYYY). Only transactions on or after January 1, 2020 may be imported.
• Inflow and Outflow — must have a positive value in either the Outflow or Inflow column for each row, not in both columns. Negative signs are assigned automatically after import to Outflow transactions.
• File size — large files are capped at 10,000 rows per upload. If you have more than this, split your file into smaller chunks and upload multiple times.

Imported rows are categorized as Other & Uncategorized. After import, use category rules and/or bulk assign to map them to your Business categories.

Tip to avoid duplicate transactions: Do not CSV-import the same date window already covered by a Plaid account into a parallel manual account. Prefer a “Historical — {bank}” manual account for pre-Plaid years, or only upload rows older than your earliest Plaid transaction for that institution.

Some transactions like credit card payments and bank transfers are not part of your business operating results, and should be excluded from your P&L reports and analysis. To keep this transaction activity out of operating results, BudgetBadger's categorization system will automatically categorize it to the appropriate category in the Excluded from P&L group (Transfers, Credit Card Payments, Sales Tax Collected).

However, this may not always properly capture 100% of your non-business transaction activity, so we recommend recategorizing transactions you identify as incorrect and setting category rules for known, recurring non-business transaction activity to ensure they are properly excluded automatically from your P&L reports and analysis for all future activity.

A few good examples of Excluded from P&L activity include business account transfers, credit card payments that would otherwise double-count spending, and collected sales tax that is then remitted to the government. One-off noise that is still a real business expense usually belongs in the right operating category rather than being hidden.

Match Bank Statements is an optional Business feature that allows you to match your bank statements to your BudgetBadger transactions. Enable it on the Settings page using the Match Bank Statements toggle. When on, the Match button becomes active, allowing you to run the Match Statement wizard.

The following is a typical workflow for the Match Bank Statements process:

• Step 1: Choose a synced checking, savings, or credit account (manual accounts are out of scope).
• Step 2: Enter your bank statement start/end dates and opening/closing balances.
• Step 3: Check off posted transactions until the difference is $0, then press the Complete button. If the difference is not $0, you may need to load more transactions and check those off, which you can do by pressing the Load More button. If matching the transactions is not sufficient, you can also press the Add Adjustment button to manually add a new transaction.
• Matched transactions will display a scale icon on the Transaction page and will be ommitted from future Match Bank Statement processes, so they are not double-counted. Press the scale icon to unreconcile a specific transaction if you need to include it again in a future Match Statement process.

To view the latest status and keep track of which accounts have been reconciled, the Accounts page displays a Last reconciled line for each synced account.

You can export a full copy of your BudgetBadger data as CSV from the Settings page in the Export My Data section.

For accountant-ready reports, use the Export button on the P&L or Balance Sheet pages to download those reports in either XLSX or PDF format.