Guide
Letting the bank tell you what happened
There is a small chore at the heart of keeping your own books. Sign in to the bank. Find the transaction list. Find the export button, which is never where it was last time. Download a file. Find the file. Upload the file. A bank feed removes all of that, and replaces it with a button.
That is the whole of the benefit, and it is not a dramatic one. What is worth explaining properly is the arrangement behind it, because giving anything access to your bank account deserves more than a reassuring sentence.
Who holds what
The connection runs through Akahu, a New Zealand company regulated to do exactly this and nothing else. The important detail is the order of events.
You connect your bank to your own Akahu account, at Akahu, using your own internet banking login. Tax App plays no part in that step. It is not on the page, it does not receive those details, and it could not use them if it did. Akahu then issues you two tokens, which you paste into Tax App.
Those tokens permit one thing: reading transactions. They cannot move money, make a payment, or alter anything at your bank, because the permission to do so does not exist and was never granted. They are stored encrypted, are never displayed again after you save them, and can be revoked by you at Akahu at any moment, without notice and without asking anybody here.
If that sounds like a lot of caveats, it is deliberate. You should be sceptical of anything that asks for access to your bank, and a company that cannot describe its own arrangement plainly is one to be sceptical of.
Setting it up
It takes about ten minutes, you do it once, and it happens in two places. The first half is at Akahu, where you connect your bank and are issued the two tokens. The second half is in Tax App, where you paste them in. Have your internet banking login to hand for the Akahu half. You type it at your bank, not at Akahu and not here.
- Create an Akahu account at my.akahu.nz. Akahu asks you to prove who you are and to turn on two factor authentication. This is what protects the connection to your bank, so it is worth doing carefully.
- Connect your bank, still at Akahu. You sign in to your bank through Akahu, exactly as you would in its own app. Tax App takes no part in this step.
- Create a personal app at my.akahu.nz/developers. The name is yours to choose. It issues the two values you need: an App ID token, which begins app_token_, and a user access token, which begins user_token_.
- Paste both tokens into Tax App, under Settings, then Bank feeds. They are checked with Akahu before anything is saved, so a mistyped or half-copied token is refused there and then rather than failing quietly a month later.
- Say what each account is for, commission or rental, one choice per account. Accounts you leave unset are ignored, which is the right answer for a personal account you would rather the app knew nothing about.
Only an owner can connect a feed, and only if bank feeds are switched on for the organisation. The user access token is the one that eventually lapses. When it does, the app says so plainly and you paste a fresh one into the same screen. Nothing else needs redoing.
What arrives
Once connected, a reconciliation stops needing a file. Press Import from bank and everything new for the financial year arrives and is matched. Import again a month later and only the genuinely new transactions come in; nothing already matched is disturbed.
You may also keep uploading files if you prefer, or do both. A feed import and a CSV upload of the same account are describing the same money, and the app treats them as such, so an overlapping period never doubles your statement.
The bank transactions screen
A connected bank makes something else possible. The app now knows about transactions you have not recorded yet, and can simply show them to you.
Your connected accounts are listed with their balances and a count of what is still waiting. Open one and you are looking at this year's transactions that have no record yet, grouped by day, the way a statement reads.
Each line has been thought about before you got there. It shows the merchant rather than the raw statement gibberish, what kind of purchase it appears to be, how it was paid, and its best guess at what you would record it as. "Rental income, looks like Priya Menon." "Rental expense, looks like Watercare." Where the guess is less certain it says so, with a question mark rather than a claim.
From there you have two moves. Add opens the ordinary income or expense form with everything already filled in, and the record quietly remembers which transaction it came from. Dismiss is for the things that are not business at all, and moves them to a list at the foot of the page where Restore will bring one back if you were too quick.
Tap any transaction for its full detail: how it appears on your statement, the merchant and its logo, the category, the payment type, and the reference, particulars and code. It is much the depth your banking app gives you, which is deliberate. Recognising a transaction is far easier when it looks familiar.
On your dashboard
A bank feed card appears on the dashboard showing live balances for the accounts you chose, and a quiet warning when rent looks late or missing for a tenancy. That last one has earned its place: a tenant who has stopped paying is a thing you want to notice in the first week rather than the second month.
Where to go next
- Reconciliation - what to do with the transactions once they are here.
- Xero - and what happens in your accountant's books when you reconcile.