Bonsai supports automatically importing expenses from bank accounts or credit cards.
We have partnered with Plaid to offer bank account and credit card connections with most major financial institutions in the United States and Canada.
Connecting your bank account or credit card
To get started with connecting your account for automatic importing, navigate to Financial Management > Expenses.
From here, click on the additional options and select 'Import Expenses' from the dropdown menu.
On the next screen, you will be prompted to connect your credit card or bank account. Click on the 'Connect Account' button to begin the process:
Bonsai partners with Plaid to connect to external financial institutions. The next step will ask you to agree to allow the data-sharing agreement by clicking 'Continue':
From here, search for your institution in the list, select it and enter your credentials in the pop-up that appears.
Note: Your data is fully encrypted with our partner, Plaid, so Bonsai does not have access to it. Find out more information here.
If you run into obstacles when linking your account, take a look at our article here which includes some additional considerations.
Once your account is successfully synced, you will be prompted to select the type of account you've imported: Personal, Business or Personal & Business.
This will help our tax engine calculate the correct deduction amounts if you have the Bonsai Tax add-on.
After these steps have been completed, you will now see your bank account or credit linked on the Import Expenses page.
The time it takes to import transactions is dependent on a few factors. To learn more about this, read our article on this topic here.
Note: Now that your expenses are imported, learn more about calculating your self-employment tax deductions and try our free self-employment tax calculator.
Managing your connected accounts
To manually sync expenses from your connected account, follow the process outlined in this article here.
If you would like to delete a linked account or credit card, simply navigate to the Import Expenses page and use the additional options to select 'Delete Account':
