FinancialForce has partnered with Plaid to enable you to connect your bank account in FinancialForce Accounting to the physical accounts held at your financial institution.
The Plaid bank integration process enables FinancialForce to import bank account transactions from your bank or other financial institution on demand, using permission-based, secure authentication.
This enables you to import bank statements for reconciliation, directly from your bank account without having to extract, store and upload a CSV file.
The Plaid bank integration process enables you to:
- Create connections to external banks or other financial institutions
- Link bank connections to bank accounts in FinancialForce Accounting
- Import your bank statement transactions using Plaid
You can see a visual representation of the Plaid Bank Integration data flow here: Plaid Bank Integration Data Flow.
Bank Connections
Bank connections store the details of each bank account to which you have connected using Plaid Link
Provides a secure authentication flow for each institution that Plaid supports. Link makes it secure and easy for you to connect your bank accounts to Plaid as it guides you through credential validation and multi-factor authentication (MFA).. These details, along with the related security credentials, are used to make authenticated calls to the Plaid API in order to retrieve your bank account transactions.
To create a connection to an external bank you must log in as the dedicated Plaid integration user.
When the Plaid integration user has successfully connected to the external bank, we recommend logging out as the dedicated Plaid integration user to prevent any accidental errors. You must then link the bank account connection to one or more bank accounts in FinancialForce Accounting. To perform this task you can log in as a standard Accounting user. For more information, see Linking a Bank Connection to a Bank Account.
Bank Connection Logs
Each time you use Plaid Link to attempt a connection to a bank or other financial institution, a connection log is generated. This provides an audit trail for tracking the process and resolving any errors that occur. There is one bank connection log per Plaid Item. A Plaid Item A Plaid term for a login at a financial institution. Most API requests interact with an Item. represents the login criteria for a connected institution.
Bank Reconciliation and Importing Bank Statements with Plaid
The Plaid Integration process imports your bank account transactions on demand. Transactions are grouped by bank account to create the bank statements and bank statement line items with a status of "imported" ready for you to perform your bank reconciliations.
If there are too many transactions for a single bank statement they are split into multiple statements. You might do this manually if you are importing CSV files.
For more information about importing your bank statements, see Importing Bank Statement Details.
Dedicated Plaid Bank Integration User
To use FinancialForce Plaid Bank Integration you need a dedicated user with an Accounting license and access to all companies. This user is also used to connect your bank accounts through Plaid and must not be used for anything other than integrations. For more information, see Setting up Plaid Bank Integration.