How connected bank accounts work in Countorra

Connecting an institution opens Plaid, which handles the sign-in with your bank directly. Countorra never receives or stores your bank username or password — what comes back from that exchange is an access token, which is encrypted before it is stored and is only ever used from the server.

Once connected, Countorra imports the accounts at that institution and then their transactions. The first import brings history across in stages, so an account can keep gaining older transactions for a short while after it first appears. After that, syncing is incremental: each run asks only for what changed.

Countorra requests transaction data. It receives the account name and type, the last four digits of the account number, balances, and the transactions themselves — date, amount, and the description the institution supplies.

It does not receive your full account number, your bank credentials, or products it has not asked for. Some banks require you to re-authorize a connection periodically; when that happens the connection reports that it needs attention rather than silently going stale.

Bank, credit card and other institutional accounts are created by connecting the institution, not by being entered manually. This is deliberate: a hand-made bank account drifts from the real one immediately, and a ledger that disagrees with the bank is worse than no ledger, because it is trusted.

Cash and wallet accounts are the exception and can be added and recorded by hand. Accounts that were entered by hand before this rule existed keep working and remain editable.