The short version: when you connect bank to Ace Budget, the link runs through Plaid and it is read-only. Transactions flow in, balances stay current, and nothing can flow out. This tutorial walks through the setup, what read-only actually means in practice, and what to check in your first week so the data you're budgeting from is trustworthy.

What read-only access actually means

Read-only is a technical boundary, not a promise. The connection Ace Budget uses can request two things from your bank: a list of transactions and a set of balances. It has no ability to initiate a transfer, pay a bill, open or close anything, or change a single setting at your bank.

A few specifics worth knowing:

• Your bank password never touches Ace Budget's servers. You type it into Plaid's own flow. Ace Budget receives the resulting data feed, not your credentials.
• Balances stay in sync automatically. That matters because Ready to Assign in Ace Budget is anchored to real account balances, so your budget can't quietly drift away from what the bank says.
• Deposits are never categorized by rules. Income lands in Ready to Assign and is handled by your income rules instead. Auto-categorization only ever touches spending.
• Pending charges wait. A pending transaction sits until it posts before any rule files it, because the amount and merchant can still change.

On the privacy side: Ace Budget doesn't sell data, doesn't run third-party analytics, and doesn't train AI on your transactions. There's also optional end-to-end encryption, which keeps payees and memos readable only on the devices of people in that budget. Amounts and dates aren't encrypted, and turning it on gives you a 24-word recovery phrase you're responsible for keeping. That's a real trade-off — lose the phrase and nobody can recover those fields for you — so it's a decision worth making deliberately rather than on the way in.

How to connect bank to Ace Budget, step by step

Set aside twenty minutes. You'll want your bank logins handy, and possibly your phone for two-factor codes.

1. Start with your everyday checking account. Not every account you own — just the one most of your spending runs through. You can add the rest once you've seen how the data looks.
2. Run the Plaid flow. Find your institution, sign in, and approve the connection. If your bank sends a verification code, expect a short wait.
3. Check the opening balance against your bank's app. They should match. If they don't, something is off before you've budgeted a dollar, and it's much easier to fix now.
4. Add your other accounts. Savings, a second checking account, credit cards you actually use. Skip the dormant ones.
5. Add anything Plaid can't reach as a manual account. Some institutions don't connect. A cash envelope, a loan held somewhere small, a brokerage you'd rather keep at arm's length — all of these can be added and updated by hand, and they still count toward your balances and net worth.

When it's done, you have every account on the same page. Same account on your phone, tablet and desktop, so you're not re-entering anything.

What to do in the first week after connecting

The first few days of imported transactions are the most useful thing you'll get from a bank connection, and also the messiest. Merchant names come through as whatever the payment processor sent, which is sometimes a clear store name and sometimes a string of characters.

Work through the backlog once, deliberately:

Categorize as you go, and say yes to the rule. When you change a transaction's category, Ace Budget offers to always categorize that merchant the same way. One tap saves it. After a week of this you'll have covered most of your regular spending, and new transactions will file themselves once they post.

Use "Apply to past" carefully. Each rule has an action that files uncategorized transactions already sitting in your register. Before it changes anything, it shows you how many it will touch. Read that number. If a rule says it's about to categorize 140 transactions and you expected a dozen, the rule is too broad — tighten it. Rules can be written by hand with contains, starts with, exact match, or a pattern if the one-tap version isn't precise enough.

Split the transactions that deserve it. The big-box run that was half groceries and half a birthday present should be split across categories rather than dumped into one.

Turn on only the notifications you'll act on. The Android app has separate toggles for deposits, bills due soon, and transactions to review, plus quiet hours. Three alerts you read beat ten you swipe away.

When a manual account is the better choice

A bank connection isn't automatically the right answer for every account. Manual entry is slower, but it's slower in a way some people find useful — you notice spending when you type it in.

Consider manual for: accounts with very little activity, an account you share with someone outside your budget, or any institution where the connection keeps breaking. You can also bring history in through CSV import, which either auto-detects the format or lets you map columns yourself. And if you ever want out, CSV export with filters is there, along with a full reset and account deletion on request.

If you're sharing the budget with a partner, one more thing is worth knowing before you connect everything: transactions in a shared budget are visible to everyone in it. Per-account sharing controls who sees each account's card and balance, and gift privacy hides the store on a single transaction while still showing the amount, so the math stays honest around a birthday.

Ace Budget has a 60-day free trial with a card on file, which is long enough to connect your accounts, live with the imported data for two full months, and decide whether the sync is doing real work for you.

What to have ready before you set up Ace Budget

Three things make the twenty minutes smooth:

• Your bank login, if you plan to connect accounts. Ace Budget uses Plaid, and the connection is read-only: it can see balances and transactions, and it can never move money. Your bank password isn't stored by Ace Budget at all.
• Your next paycheck: roughly how much, and when it lands.
• A rough list of bills with due dates. Rent or mortgage, utilities, phone, insurance, minimum debt payments.

If you don't have the bank login handy, skip the connection for now. You can add accounts manually and connect later.

The four onboarding steps

Sign in with Google and Ace Budget walks you through four screens.

1. Welcome. A short explanation of the idea: assign every dollar, save toward what matters, and aim to spend last month's income rather than this week's.
2. Connect Your Accounts. Press "Connect with Plaid" to link checking, savings, credit cards, or loans. Balances and transactions pull in on their own from here on. You can also skip this step and add accounts manually later from the Accounts screen.
3. Roughly, what comes in? Enter your monthly take-home pay after tax. An estimate is fine; the app gets exact once your transactions sync.
4. Here's a starter budget. Ace Budget lays out a set of categories with monthly targets based on rough averages. These are targets to aim at, not money that has been assigned, and they are not your numbers yet. Savings goals start empty on purpose, because only you know what a trip or a rainy-day fund should cost.

After the fourth step you start the 60-day free trial. A card goes on file and nothing is charged until day 61; you can cancel from inside the app at any point.

Make the starter budget yours

You land on the Budget screen. Spend five minutes here before assigning anything:

• Rename categories to match how you actually think about money. "Dining" might be "Takeout" for you.
• Trim targets that don't fit. The starter numbers are averages; yours are usually lower in some places and higher in others.
• Delete what doesn't apply. No car, no car category.
• Add what's missing with "New category." This is where the irregular bills go: car insurance, the holidays, the water heater you know is coming. Give each one a target with the amount and the date it's due, and the app works out the monthly share for you.

Don't aim for perfect. A budget you adjust for three months ends up far more accurate than one you agonize over on night one.

Assign your first dollars

Now look at Ready to Assign at the top of the Budget screen. It's the money sitting in your accounts that hasn't been given a purpose yet. Because it is anchored to your real balances, it can't be a number you hope is true.

Work down the list in priority order:

1. Bills due before your next paycheck first. Assign what each one needs.
2. Groceries and gas to get you to that paycheck.
3. Minimum debt payments.
4. Then targets: "Fill to monthly" on a category assigns this month's share of its target in one tap; "Fill to full target" assigns the whole thing if you can afford it.

Stop when Ready to Assign reads zero. If it hits zero before everything is funded, that's not a failure; that's the honest picture, and the next paycheck picks up where this one left off. If you have money left over, give it a job too, even if the job is "spending money."

Set up one paycheck rule

This is the step that makes the second month easier than the first. Open Settings → Rules & Automation and add an income rule. Each rule says what to do with a deposit the moment it arrives: a fixed amount to rent, a percentage to savings, or "to target" for a category with a goal, in the order you choose. The next time your paycheck lands, the split happens for you and Ready to Assign shows only what's left to decide.

The same screen holds auto-categorization rules. You rarely need to write one by hand: when you change a transaction's category, Ace Budget offers to always categorize that merchant the same way, and one tap saves the rule. From then on, adding a transaction for that merchant fills the category in for you.

Your weekly five minutes

From here the routine is small:

• Transactions. New activity arrives on its own if you connected a bank. Glance through, give each one a category, and split any purchase that covered more than one thing.
• Reconcile. Once a week, open the Reconcile screen, compare each account's cleared balance with the bank, and mark it reconciled. Drift never gets more than a few days old.
• Reflect. When you want to see where the money went, the Reflect screen shows monthly income against spending, with transfers between your own accounts left out so the picture is honest.

On a phone, the same screens sit behind the Budget, Activity, Reports, Money and More tabs.

If you share money with someone, Settings is also where you invite them. A partner joins free on your subscription and sees the shared budget; you choose which of your accounts' cards and balances they see.

That's the whole setup. Twenty minutes, four steps, one rule. The 60-day trial is long enough to live through two full paychecks and see whether the calm sticks.

This gets blamed on willpower. It usually isn't. The budget and the bank drifted apart, and once the numbers stop matching, the budget stops meaning anything. Nobody follows a plan they don't trust.

The fix is structural, not motivational: build the budget on top of the bank balance, so the two can't disagree for long.

What drift is and where it comes from

Drift is the gap between what your budget says you have and what your accounts actually hold. It creeps in from small, ordinary things:

• A purchase that never got entered
• A refund that showed up in the account but not the budget
• A transfer between accounts logged once, or twice, or not at all
• A bill on autopay that you forgot was on autopay
• A paycheck slightly different from the one you planned for

Each one is a few dollars. Together, over a month, they're the $232 gap between the spreadsheet and the bank. And the trouble with drift is that it's invisible until it's large. There's no moment where the budget announces it's wrong. It just slowly becomes fiction.

Flip the order: bank first, categories second

A traditional budget starts with a plan and then tries to make reality match it. An anchored budget starts with reality and divides it up.

The mechanics are simple. Your accounts hold a certain total right now. Every dollar of that total gets assigned to a category: rent, groceries, the car fund, spending money. The sum of the categories equals the sum of the accounts. Always. If a transaction comes in that the budget doesn't know about, the total in the categories is now wrong, and the budget can tell you exactly by how much.

That last part is the whole game. An anchored budget notices when it's wrong. A spreadsheet doesn't.

Why bank sync matters more than it sounds

Automatically importing transactions from your bank sounds like a convenience feature. It's actually what makes anchoring practical. Manually entering every purchase is the point where most people's budgets die, because the day you skip is the day drift starts.

With a read-only connection to your accounts, transactions arrive on their own. Your job shrinks to two things: put each transaction in a category, and glance at whether the category totals still match the accounts. The first takes seconds, especially once the tool learns that the coffee shop goes in "Coffee." The second is a single number: the difference between what the budget thinks and what the bank says. When it's zero, you're done.

Read-only is the important word. A good connection can see your activity. It cannot move your money, and it never needs your online banking password stored anywhere in the app.

Reconciling: the five-minute habit that prevents everything

Even with sync, reconcile once a week. Reconciling just means confirming that the balance in your budget for each account matches the balance the bank shows, as of right now.

1. Open the account in your budget and in your bank's app.
2. Compare the cleared balances.
3. If they match, mark it reconciled. Done.
4. If they don't, find the difference. It's almost always one transaction: a missing one, a duplicate, or a pending charge that hasn't cleared.

Five minutes a week, and drift never gets past a few days old. Compare that with discovering a $232 gap in April and trying to reconstruct three months.

What this changes about how the budget feels

When the budget is anchored, a few things happen that are hard to appreciate until you've lived with them.

The "available" number becomes real. If the grocery category says $140, there is $140 in a bank account that isn't spoken for by anything else. You can spend it without checking three other places first.

Overspending shows up immediately and specifically. If dining out went $60 over, one category is red, and the budget asks you to cover it from another one. The bank balance is unaffected by the decision because the money was always there. You're just re-deciding what it's for.

Sinking funds become trustworthy. The $900 you've set aside for insurance is actual money in an actual account, tagged so you don't touch it. It isn't a hopeful number in a cell.

You stop maintaining two systems. The budget is not a parallel universe you update after the fact. It's a layer of labels on top of what's actually there.

Setting this up if you're starting from scratch

You don't need to reconstruct history. Start from today.

• Connect or enter each account with its current balance.
• Assign every dollar to a category until nothing is unassigned. Yes, all of it, including the money you plan to spend on nothing in particular. Give that its own category.
• Categorize new transactions as they arrive.
• Reconcile weekly.

Ace Budget is built around this model: the "ready to assign" number is anchored to your live account balances, so the budget can never quietly wander away from the bank. But the principle works in any tool, including paper. The budget starts from the bank. Everything else is labels.

If your budget has drifted before, the problem wasn't you. The system was designed to be right on the first day and slowly wrong after that. Anchor it, and it's designed to be right every day.