Connect your business bank and credit card accounts to PortaPro and your real bank activity appears alongside the payments and expenses you already track. Every transaction is matched to a record you confirm yourself, so your books reflect what actually cleared the bank instead of what someone remembered to enter.
This article covers connecting an account, how syncing works, importing a bank statement, matching transactions (including receipts), categorization rules, what PortaPro can and cannot do with your bank data, and disconnecting.
Where it lives
Financials → Banking, with four tabs:
| Tab | What it does |
|---|---|
| Accounts | Connect accounts, see balances, sync on demand, import statements, disconnect |
| Transactions | The bank feed (synced and imported lines), plus manually recorded entries |
| Reconciliation | Match bank activity to recorded payments, expenses and receipts |
| Rules | Fill in the category and vendor for bank lines and receipts you code the same way every time |
Connecting and disconnecting accounts, importing statements, Sync now and editing rules are admin-only. Any office user can view the feed and work the reconciliation queue.
Connecting an account
PortaPro never sees your banking username or password. Sign-in happens inside the connection window, which is operated by Stripe, our payments provider. What comes back to PortaPro is read-only account information: the institution name, the account type, the last four digits, balances, and transaction history.
Bank connections are read-only by design. PortaPro cannot move money, initiate a payment, or make a transfer from a connected account. The connection exists to show you what happened, nothing more.
If your bank is not listed
Coverage depends on our provider's network, which is strong for national and regional banks but does not include every small institution or credit union. If you cannot find your bank, use Import statement with the CSV, OFX / QFX or Excel download from your bank's website, or record transactions manually in the Transactions tab; reconciliation works the same way. Let us know which bank you use, because coverage is something we track.
How syncing works
Transactions update automatically once a day, early each morning. Your bank's own updates also arrive as they land.
For today's activity, click Sync now. It is at the top of the Transactions and Reconciliation tabs (it syncs every connected account) and on each account on the Accounts tab. Next to it, "Updated {date, time}" says when the feed was last refreshed. Balances refresh when you click Sync now.
Two things worth knowing about timing:
Importing a bank statement
Use Import statement (Accounts tab, or the top of the Transactions tab) for history older than the bank connection reaches, or for an account that isn't connected at all, such as a bank our provider doesn't cover.
Nothing is doubled. Lines the account already has are skipped, so importing an overlapping statement twice is safe. On a connected account, lines the bank feed already brought in are skipped, and if the feed later brings in a line you imported, the two become one, keeping any match you made.
Imported lines are marked imported in Transactions and are ready to reconcile like any other bank line. Every import is listed under Statement imports on the Accounts tab with its file, account, dates and count, and Undo removes it. Lines you already matched or ignored are kept on undo.
Matching transactions
The Reconciliation tab is where the bank feed meets your records. Its views are To review, Matched and Ignored.
For each unmatched transaction PortaPro suggests up to three candidates, scored on how closely the amount, date, and description line up, and labeled High, Medium, or Low confidence. A deposit is matched against recorded payments; a withdrawal is matched against expenses and against receipts in your receipt inbox. Candidates more than 45 days from the transaction date are not considered at all.
Nothing matches itself. Every link is a decision you make, and every decision is reversible:
In the Matched view, an expense with no receipt is flagged "· no receipt" in amber, with Attach receipt right there.
A confidence score is a starting point, not an instruction. A High-confidence suggestion is still a suggestion, and two invoices for the same amount in the same week are exactly the case where the software cannot know which is which and you can.
What a good reconciliation session looks like
Work the unmatched queue oldest first. Confirm the obvious matches, add expenses for the withdrawals you never logged, and ignore the internal transfers. What is left over is the interesting part: a deposit with no matching payment usually means a customer paid and it was never recorded, and a withdrawal with no expense is a cost that never made it into your numbers.
Categorization rules
The Rules tab holds rules that fill in the category and vendor when you add a bank line or a receipt as an expense, for the merchants you code the same way every time. Rules only fill in the form; you still confirm every expense, and nothing is created or matched on its own.
Rules are learned when you check Always use this… on a form, or created with New rule (match bank transaction text or a receipt vendor name, contains / is exactly / starts with, an optional amount range and a priority). Test your rules shows which rule a given bank text would hit. See Receipts and Expenses for the details.
Disconnecting an account
On the Accounts tab, choose Disconnect on the account (or Remove for an account that only holds imported statements).
Disconnecting stops syncing immediately, revokes PortaPro's access at your bank, and deletes the synced balances and transactions for that account. Any payments or expenses you already matched them to are your own records and are kept, along with the match history. Disconnecting cannot be undone; to resume, connect the account again and the feed starts fresh.
Your bank data and your privacy
The full disclosure is in section 1.7 of the Privacy Policy.
Troubleshooting
"We couldn't start the bank connection." Something went wrong before the bank window opened. Try again, and contact support if it repeats. Support can see the underlying reason in the logs.
The account connected but there are no transactions. While the account shows Waiting on bank, Stripe is still fetching its history; transactions appear on their own, usually within a few minutes. Brand-new accounts and accounts with no recent activity legitimately have nothing to show.
I need transactions from before the connection. Banks share a limited history through the connection. Use Import statement with older statements from your bank's website.
A statement import shows money in and out the wrong way round. Switch on Money in and out look backwards? on the preview step. Card exports often list charges as positive numbers.
I imported the wrong file. Accounts tab → Statement imports → Undo on that import.
A balance looks out of date. The balance is whatever your bank last reported. Click Sync now to refresh it; if your bank is slow to post, PortaPro cannot be faster than the source.
The connection needs reauthorization. Banks periodically require you to sign in again, and some do so every 90 days. The account will show that it needs attention. Reconnect it from the Accounts tab.
A transaction I already reconciled reappeared as unmatched. That is unexpected. Check whether the payment or expense it was linked to was deleted, since removing the record it pointed at releases the match.