Automatic Imports
We rely on Plaid, a third-party banking provider, to import transactions and balances for your bank accounts. Plaid is a popular, secure and established service also used by a slew of other personal finance apps on the market.
Currently, we are only legally allowed to provide this service to US & Canadian based banks. If you are based outside of this region, you may instead take advantage of our CSV import tool or developer API to get bulk transactions into Lunch Money.
We'd love to integrate with international banks for automatic imports, but unfortunately we're running into blockers due to data privacy laws as we're a Canadian-based company.
We'd love to work on connecting to European and Australian banks for automatic imports. We're actively working with a number of data providers and waiting patiently for them to work with local regulators and hopefully pave the way for us one day to support our international users with automatic imports. As you can probably imagine, this could take a while.
In the meantime, we have a developer API which we're hoping will bridge the gap between Lunch Money & international banks. We already have a few European banks supported via community-made open source plugins such as bunq and Monzo!
We also highly recommend using our CSV import tool which we have been putting a lot of effort towards making as seamless as possible. Almost 40% of our users are international users so this method has been proven sustainable for long-term use on Lunch Money!
Balance and transactions are fetched automatically when we receive a notice via webhook from your bank & Plaid (our third-party banking provider) that there are new transactions. On rare occasions, this webhook doesn't arrive or somewhere along the line, something hiccups and we don't fetch the latest. In this case, you can manually trigger a fetch from the Transactions page by clicking on the refresh icon:
This operation is also automatically triggered if you go to the Transactions page and we determine that it's been over 12 hours since we last fetch transactions for your accounts.
You can get more information on when we last fetched transactions & balances for your accounts from the Accounts page.
Do you have an ad-blocker or other browser extensions that disable Javascript or otherwise intended to modify behaviour of websites? If so, we've heard reports that these can affect the ability to connect to an institution. We suggest turning these off temporarily when attempting to connect.
Do you have 2FA set up on your account? If so, institutions requiring a new one-time password on every login are not currently supported due to the nature of the connection.
Do you have multiple secret questions & answers set up? If so, it may require you to connect a few more times in order to collect all the answers to all the questions you have set up.
For any other issues, feel free to reach out to support@lunchmoney.app or use the in-app "Submit a bug or feedback" button at the bottom right of every page.
This is most likely related to a multi-factor authentication setting that you have enabled with your bank. In general, Plaid can handle 2FA. However, if a bank requires a unique one-time password on every login or otherwise very frequently, then Plaid will have difficulty maintaining connection. We always suggest checking to see if your bank provides you with app passwords or a setting to enable trusted devices– those would help Plaid maintain the connection!
We're currently not able to get transactions for brokerage/investment accounts. We may be able to get the latest balance if the institution your account is associated with is not deemed an "investment-only bank". If it is, then we suggest creating a manually-managed asset to track the balance yourself.
The reason for this is simply because fetching transactions for brokerage/investment accounts costs us much more money. At this point, we are choosing to focus mainly on tracking expenses and we are not pursuing to become an investment or portfolio tracking app.
Unfortunately, we don't have control over which institutions are supported by Plaid.
According to Plaid, they are not currently prioritizing new institution builds. Their recommendation is to reach out to your financial institution on their behalf and ask them to submit a contact request via https://plaid.com/plaid-exchange/ if they are interested in collaborating directly with Plaid on an API integration.
