Synced Accounts
Your bank feeding Cadence Money, instead of you typing every coffee into it.
Updated
What Syncing Does
A synced account imports your transactions and balances in the background. Instead of typing every purchase in yourself, the transaction list stays current through the day, and balances refresh on each sync so your net worth and cash flow stay accurate.
The rest of Cadence Money lights up around it: budgets track actual spend, recurring detection spots new subscriptions, and your dashboard reflects the real state of things rather than a snapshot you maintain by hand.
Which Plans Include It
| Plan | Synced connections |
|---|---|
| Cadence | None - manual accounts and CSV import |
| Cadence+ | Up to 3 |
| Cadence Premium | Unlimited |
The app counts connections rather than banks, and a Synced Investments brokerage costs one of the same slots. So on Cadence+, linking one brokerage leaves two slots for banks rather than three. If a bank and a brokerage happen to be the same institution, that is still two connections - they are separate links, which is what lets you drop one without dropping the other.
Syncing is the only thing that differs between plans; every other feature is on every plan. If you upgrade later, all your existing manual accounts and history stay in place - you simply add connections alongside them.
Synced Investments has a slightly stricter gate
Bank syncing and investment syncing are both on Cadence+ and Premium, but a billing problem does not hit them the same way. A past-due or cancelled subscription pauses every connection you have, banks included. An incomplete one - a first payment that never finished - leaves your banks syncing but refuses a new Synced Investments connection until billing is healthy again. Settle the payment and the option comes back.
Linking a Bank
Linking takes about a minute. The flow is handled by Plaid, the same connection layer used by most major personal finance apps.
- Open Settings → Connected Banks and tap Connect a Bank. You can also start from the + button on any page and choose Connect Bank, then tap Connect new bank on the panel that opens.
- Search for your bank or financial institution by name.
- Sign in securely with your bank credentials inside the Plaid window.
- Approve any multi-factor authentication your bank requires.
- Select which accounts you would like to sync.
Cadence Money names the banks that are failing right now
Take the + route above and the panel that opens carries a caution listing the institutions people are currently failing to connect to. It is read from live data - Plaid’s own published health for each bank, plus the connection attempts Cadence Money users are actually making - and it names every affected bank rather than the first few, so the one question it has to answer, whether yours is on it, always has an answer. A bank appearing there is not something you can fix from your side; use CSV import until it clears.
It is Canada only, and it appears in two places: this panel, and the onboarding step where you first connect. Settings → Connected Banks goes straight to the bank search without it, so check from the + menu if you want to see it. No caution means nothing current is worth reporting, which is not the same as every bank being healthy.
Brokerages are linked from the + menu
Settings → Connected Banks lists your Synced Investments brokerages alongside your banks, and manages them the same way. But you cannot create one from there - Connect a Bank only ever starts a bank link. Use the + button and choose Connect Investments, which opens a brokerage picker rather than the full bank list.
Canada and the US only
Those are the only two countries Cadence Money can link, so an account held at a bank elsewhere cannot be synced. If your bank is not listed, fall back to CSV import.
In a household
Household members with the Add permission can link their own banks, and choose which of the new accounts the household can see. Each connection counts toward the account holder’s plan, and only the person who linked a bank can reconnect or disconnect it. If you both bank at the same place, connect it again with your own login; accounts already connected, like a joint account, are skipped. See Household Members.
What Each Account Type Brings Across
| Account type | What comes across |
|---|---|
| Chequing and savings | Balance and transactions |
| Credit cards | Balance, transactions and the credit limit |
| Investment or brokerage, shared on a Synced Bank connection | Balance and transactions - no positions |
| Investment or brokerage, on a Synced Investments connection | Balance and the positions held - no transactions |
| Loans and mortgages | Outstanding balance and payment activity |
Two consequences surprise people often enough to state plainly:
- The two investment rows are two different connections. A brokerage you tick during an ordinary Synced Bank link brings its balance and its transactions, and nothing about the securities inside it. To get the actual positions - share counts, prices and what they are worth - link it as a Synced Investments connection instead, which is a separate link that deliberately never requests transactions. You can also record positions by hand, on either kind of connection or with none at all - see Holdings & Investments.
- Loan and card terms are not downloaded. No minimum payment, interest rate, statement date, due date or amortisation schedule. You can record those on a manually added credit card or loan - see Credit Cards & Loans.
Linking your everyday chequing account, your main credit card and a savings account covers most people’s daily flow without overwhelming the dashboard.
How Often It Syncs
New transactions appear throughout the day as your bank posts them, typically within a few hours of being charged. Cadence Money does not sync on a fixed schedule and does not sync when you open the app; your bank pushes updates as it has them.
Two things let you sync on demand:
- Pull to refresh on a phone or tablet, which syncs every connected bank.
- Force Refresh from a bank’s overflow menu in Settings → Connected Banks, which syncs just that institution.
Balances are throttled separately from transactions, on three different clocks, so a Force Refresh often returns the same balance with newer transactions:
| What you did | Shortest gap before your bank is asked again |
|---|---|
| Force Refresh, or pull to refresh | 6 hours per institution |
| Nothing - your bank pushed an update | 12 hours per institution |
| Opened a screen that reads a live balance | 5 minutes per institution |
Inside any of those windows Cadence Money shows the balance it already holds rather than asking your bank again. Transactions are not throttled this way. Pending transactions are included as soon as your bank publishes them, then reconciled when they post - there is nothing to clean up by hand.
Re-Authentication
Banks periodically require you to re-confirm a connection. Cadence Money shows a prompt next to the affected account, and the flow is the same as the initial link: a quick sign-in inside the Plaid window.
A Reconnect Banks widget also appears on your dashboard when something needs attention, so you are not relying on noticing it in Settings. If a connection has been broken for more than a few days, see Troubleshooting Connections.
Multi-Currency
Cadence Money supports CAD, USD and GBP accounts side by side, though only Canadian and US accounts can be linked to a bank - the rest you track manually. Each account keeps its native currency on its own page so the figures match what your bank shows.
On dashboard-level totals like net worth and cash flow, foreign balances are converted into your primary currency using daily rates. The original currency is preserved on every transaction, and with Show Original Currencies on (the default) that is the amount each transaction shows. See Multi-Currency.
Security Model
Your bank credentials are never stored by Cadence Money. The sign-in happens entirely inside Plaid’s window, and what comes back is a read-only access token that fetches transactions and balances.
- Cadence Money cannot move money.
- Cadence Money cannot change your bank settings.
- Cadence Money never sees your bank login.
You can revoke any connection from inside Cadence Money at any time, which removes the access token both here and at Plaid.
Tip
Link your most-used accounts first, usually your everyday chequing account and your main credit card. Investment, loan and secondary accounts can wait until you have settled in.
Editing Synced Transactions
Synced transactions are yours to refine. Categories, budget assignments, notes and merchant names can all be edited without affecting the underlying bank record, and category learning picks up the pattern so future transactions arrive pre-cleaned.
The amount, the date and the account belong to the bank and cannot be changed here. See Transactions.