If you’ve linked your Goodbudget Account to an outside financial institution using the Premium plan, you might be wondering when you should expect to see your automatically imported transactions appear.
Goodbudget uses a service called Plaid to allow you to connect your Goodbudget Accounts with your bank accounts. Plaid receives information about new transactions from your bank, including both cleared and pending transactions, and then sends them to Goodbudget right away. The bank sets the schedule for when and how often Plaid receives information about new transactions.
If you’ve connected multiple financial institutions, you may notice one sends transactions at noon every day, while another sends that information in the late afternoon.
Timing of Cleared Transactions
The timing depends on when your bank clears transactions, and how often they allow Plaid to check their servers for new transactions. Generally, banks allow Plaid to check their servers for newly cleared items once a day, but some don’t allow requests as frequently, and that will delay when you see new transactions in your Goodbudget.
Timing of Pending Transactions
Pending transactions are different from cleared transactions in that they should appear in your budget faster, but the exact timing will be determined by how fast your bank processes that information and sends it to Plaid.
Goodbudget displays pending transactions at the top of your Transactions view. A pending transaction is an authorized hold on your bank account for a purchase that hasn’t fully processed yet. While these transactions are visible, they may not reflect the final amount so they cannot be edited in Goodbudget.
Generally, pending transactions will be removed at the same time the corresponding cleared transaction appears in your budget. But it’s possible that these processes happen separately. The timing is determined by your bank.
