Bank Integration (Plaid)

Connect your group's bank account to see real transaction data alongside your planned expenses — including how 5-by-5 stores and protects the data.

Overview

5-by-5 integrates with Plaid to give you visibility into your group’s actual bank transactions on the Finances page. This is optional — the rest of the billing and ledger features work without it — but it’s useful for comparing what you planned to spend with what you actually spent.

Plaid is separate from Stripe Connect, which 5-by-5 uses for collecting member payments. Bank integration via Plaid is read-only: 5-by-5 sees your transactions but cannot initiate or modify any.

What Plaid Does

Plaid is a secure financial data service used by thousands of apps to read (read-only) transaction and balance data from your bank. 5-by-5 uses Plaid to:

• Show your current bank balance on the Finances page and the dashboard Overview
• Display your actual transactions for any month in the Actual Expenses section

5-by-5 never initiates transfers or makes changes to your bank account. The connection is strictly read-only.

Connecting Your Bank Account

1. On the Finances page, click Connect Bank Account in the Financial Snapshot section (or in the Actual Expenses section)
2. The Plaid Link dialog will open in your browser
3. Search for and select your bank
4. Log in with your bank credentials directly in the Plaid dialog — 5-by-5 never sees your username or password
5. Select the account you want to connect (checking, money market, etc.)
6. Confirm the connection

Once connected, your bank balance and recent transactions will appear on the Finances page.

Syncing Transactions

Transactions don’t update automatically on every page load. To pull the latest data, click Sync Now in the Actual Expenses section. This fetches the most recent transactions from Plaid and updates the displayed list.

Transaction History & Storage

When 5-by-5 first connects your bank, we request up to 24 months of historical transactions from Plaid in a single backfill. How far back Plaid actually returns varies significantly by institution: some banks deliver close to a full 24 months, while others (Bank of America is one known example) return only a few months even when 24 is requested. There’s nothing 5-by-5 can do to extend that — it’s a limit set by the bank on what Plaid is allowed to hand over. After the backfill, every Sync Now click brings in any new transactions Plaid has, plus a 7-day overlap to pick up pending charges that have since posted. Everything we pull is saved to 5-by-5’s database (see Where Your Data Lives below for the specifics).

This matters because Plaid’s transaction window is rolling, not permanent. The longer your bank stays connected, the richer your transaction history becomes in 5-by-5 — older entries that Plaid eventually stops returning remain visible because we saved them when we pulled them. Useful for year-over-year budget comparisons, multi-year cost trends, or answering “what did we spend at the annual two years ago?” without having to log into the bank’s own portal.

Where Your Data Lives

Because we’re saving transaction history to make point #2 above work, we want to be explicit about where it’s saved and who can see it — financial records are sensitive, and some groups are understandably particular.

Where the data lives. When 5-by-5 pulls transactions from Plaid, they’re saved to 5-by-5’s database, which runs on Supabase (managed PostgreSQL hosted on cloud infrastructure). The data does not live on your computer or phone — it’s stored remotely, the same way the rest of your group’s data is (members, flights, maintenance, ledger). If having financial transaction data in a remote database is a deal-breaker for your group, the bank integration is optional and can be left disconnected; the rest of 5-by-5’s billing and ledger features work without it.

What we store from Plaid.

• For each transaction: date, merchant name, amount, pending/posted status, Plaid’s category, and an opaque transaction ID
• An opaque Plaid account_id — not your real bank account number
• The Plaid access token for the connection, used by our Edge Functions to call Plaid on your behalf

What we do not store.

• Your bank login credentials — those go directly to Plaid in their own dialog; 5-by-5 never sees them
• Your full account number or routing number
• A persistent history of account balances — the current balance is fetched live from Plaid each time, not snapshotted in our database
• Any ability to move money — Plaid’s Transactions product is read-only by design; we couldn’t initiate a transfer if we wanted to

Who can see your transactions.

• Only members of the group the transactions belong to. Row-level security policies in the database prevent any other 5-by-5 customer’s account — and any external request — from reading them, even by mistake. The access scope is enforced at the database layer, not just the application layer.
• Within a group, bank-derived data appears in the Actual Expenses section on the Finances page, which is scoped to the same audience that already sees the ledger and member balances (typically Owners, Admins, and Treasurers). Regular members don’t see bank transactions.

How the data is protected.

• Encrypted at rest on Supabase’s managed infrastructure
• TLS in transit for every connection between your browser, our Edge Functions, Plaid, and Supabase
• Row-level security policies enforced at the database layer, so access is gated below the application — a misbehaving query couldn’t return another group’s rows
• No third-party data sharing — Plaid is the upstream source and Supabase is the storage backend; transaction data isn’t sold, shared with advertisers, or used to train any model

If you ever want it gone. Click Disconnect in the Bank Balance section. Both the Plaid link and every cached transaction for your group are removed from our database. There’s no soft-delete or tombstone — the rows go away.

Re-Authenticating (Update Mode)

Banks occasionally require you to re-authenticate the connection — typically when you change your bank password, an account changes, or the bank’s security policy requires periodic reverification. When this happens:

1. The bank balance will stop updating
2. A small banner appears on the Finances page indicating re-auth is needed
3. Click Re-authenticate to open the Plaid Update Mode dialog and confirm your bank credentials
4. The connection resumes immediately

If you ignore the banner, no real harm is done — historical transactions stay visible — but you won’t see new transactions until you re-authenticate.

Changing Your Bank Account

If you want to connect a different account or bank, click Change Account in the Bank Balance section of the Finances page. This runs the Plaid Link flow again and replaces the existing connection with the new one.

Disconnecting

To remove the bank connection entirely, click Disconnect in the Bank Balance section. You’ll be asked to confirm — once disconnected, the connection and all cached transactions are removed. You can reconnect at any time by clicking Connect Bank.

Australia Support

Plaid’s coverage in Australia is limited and goes through the Consumer Data Right (CDR) framework, which is separate from the US integration. Bank integration for Australian groups is not yet supported — manual ledger entry works for everything else. We’re tracking AU bank integration on our roadmap; reach out at support@blueskyapplications.com if this matters for your group.

What About Categorization?

Plaid provides a high-level merchant category (e.g., “Food & Drink”, “Transfer”, “Service”) for each transaction. 5-by-5 doesn’t currently re-categorize these into our planned-expense categories (Hangar, Insurance, Fuel, Maintenance) — that’s manual reconciliation today. We’re considering auto-matching to planned expenses as a future enhancement.