Plaid Bank Feeds for Rental Bookkeeping

Rental cash flow is noisy: rent ACH credits, maintenance cards, insurance drafts, loan payments, owner draws, and transfers between operating and reserve accounts. If those only live on the bank statement until you copy them by hand, your books lag reality — and reconciliation becomes archaeology.

A Plaid feed does not replace judgment. It stages the bank’s version of events so you can categorize, split, and match faster. You still decide what belongs on the rental ledger; you just stop spending the first half of bookkeeping day on data entry.

Plaid bank linking and transaction import are available on the Investor plan and above, inside the Financials area for managers. Landlord-plan users can still enter transactions manually or import a CSV, then reconcile the same way.

Your organization may also need Plaid-related settings under Owner Configuration where applicable. Server-side Plaid credentials for the environment (testing vs production) are separate from your subscription — if Connect fails with a configuration error, that is an environment setup issue, not a plan mystery.

Start from Connected Bank Accounts at /Plaid, or begin the Link flow from Plaid Transaction Import at /TransactionImport:

1. Choose Connect New Bank Account (or the Connect action on Transaction Import). That opens Plaid Link in a secure overlay — you authenticate with the bank, not by pasting passwords into Tenantivo.
2. Select the institution and the checking (or operating) account that receives rent and pays property expenses. Prefer a dedicated rental account when you can; mixed personal/business accounts create more review work later.
3. Confirm the link succeeds, then open Connected Bank Accounts to see linked items, run a connection test, and troubleshoot if an item needs re-authentication.

Link only the accounts you bookkeep in Tenantivo. Extra personal accounts in the feed add noise without helping reconciliation.

Connecting is not the same as posting. From Transaction Import:

• Pull from Plaid — Stages recent bank activity in a review grid. Nothing hits your transaction report until you choose what to import.
• Review the grid — Check amounts, dates, and descriptions. Skip transfers between your own accounts if they would double-count cash movement. Watch for duplicates from overlapping date windows.
• Import what you want — Commit selected lines into the transaction report, then categorize against your chart of accounts the same way you would for a manual entry.

Treat the pull as a staging area, not an auto-post. That habit is what keeps Plaid from creating more cleanup than it saves.

Once lines are in the ledger, finish the job the bank feed started:

• Assign each imported debit or credit to the right income or expense account (repairs, insurance, management fees, mortgage principal/interest splits, and so on).
• Split mixed charges when one bank line covers more than one property or category.
• Match imported bank activity to GL entries during bank reconciliation so statement balance and books agree before you close the period.

For the full monthly loop — statement, match, investigate, lock — see Bank Reconciliation for Landlords Without an Accountant . If you also push activity to QuickBooks, pair the feed with Connecting QuickBooks Online so import, categorize, and sync stay in one rhythm.

• Pull on a schedule — Weekly or after each rent cycle beats a giant catch-up import at month-end.
• Avoid double windows — Overlapping pull ranges are a common source of duplicate transactions. Delete duplicates before you reconcile.
• Re-link when the bank asks — Password changes and MFA resets can break an item. Use Connected Bank Accounts to test and reconnect instead of creating a second link to the same account.
• Keep CSV as a fallback — If an institution is unavailable in Plaid, download a statement CSV and import that; the review and reconciliation steps stay the same.

For the click-by-click walkthrough inside the product, see Integrations → Plaid training .