The Banks screen

Connect your accounts once. After that, transactions walk in on their own.

Connecting a bank

Press + Connect a bank. SkrillaPlan sends you to a page Plaid runs — the same service most finance apps use — then brings you right back. Find your bank there, sign in with your bank credentials, and land back on this screen with your accounts showing. The hop out and back is expected. → Why connecting sends you to Plaid

Two things worth knowing:

• Your bank password never touches SkrillaPlan. The whole sign-in happens inside Plaid. We receive transactions, never credentials.
• The access token Plaid gives us is stored server-side where no browser — including yours — can read it.

Connect every account money moves through: checking, savings, credit cards. The budget can only be honest about accounts it can see. (Bonus: with both sides connected, credit-card payments are detected as transfers automatically instead of counting as spending.)

A household can connect up to five institutions — generous for a household, since one connection brings all of that bank's accounts along.

Still deciding whether to do this at all? Fair. → Is it safe to connect my bank?

Accounts and balances

Cash on hand sits at the top: your checking and savings balances, added up. Credit cards and loans stay out of that number on purpose — it's money you have, not net worth. (Net worth has its own line — the 🏦 Net worth report.)

Under it, each connected bank lists every account it shared: name, last four digits, and a balance. Checking and savings show what's available; credit cards show what's owed. When a bank reports an available balance (after holds), you see that; when it doesn't, you see the current balance, labeled balance.

Balances refresh at every sync — on their own each morning, or when you press ↻ Sync on the Transactions screen. The page says as of last sync because that's the truth. Each bank shows its last sync time too.

• Balances are display-only. The envelopes run on transactions; a balance never changes your budget math. To make the two worlds agree, use the bank check in the Budget screen's math panel. → the bank check
• After connecting, give the list a skim. It shows every account the bank shared — including the ones you forgot you had.

When a bank asks you to sign in again

Bank logins expire. Security questions change, a bank rotates its MFA, a platform migration lands on a Tuesday — and the connection stops pulling new transactions until you sign in again. This is routine. Nothing is broken and you didn't do anything wrong.

The page names the bank and puts a Reconnect button beside it. That button takes the same short trip out to Plaid and back that connecting did, so your credentials still never touch SkrillaPlan. You're not re-adding anything: the connection is repaired in place, it doesn't cost you one of your five institutions, and everything already synced stays exactly where it is.

A sync runs the moment it works. Fresh transactions are your receipt.

Some problems aren't yours to fix. When it's one of those, the callout says we're on it and there's no button — because pressing one wouldn't help.

Disconnecting

Disconnect unlinks the bank and stops new imports. Transactions already synced stay in your history — disconnecting never rewrites the past.

No bank? No problem.

Import CSV / YNAB takes you to the Import screen. Manual-first budgeting is real budgeting. Some people prefer it. The envelopes don't care how the transactions arrive. → Is it safe to connect my bank?