Bank Feed

A bank feed is what most modern accounting software eventually offers: a live, ongoing connection to a bank, often through a service like Plaid, that pulls new transactions in automatically as they post, without anyone manually uploading a statement.

BalanceMCP does not have this today. It's worth stating plainly rather than letting it be discovered by surprise: there's no live sync pulling transactions from a bank on its own. Every bank transaction that ends up in the books arrived because a statement — a PDF, a CSV, sometimes pasted text — was extracted and imported through a specific, manual call, whether that extraction was done by a person or an AI assistant working from the document.

This shapes the practical workflow directly: keeping books current means periodically importing new statements as they become available, rather than expecting new activity to simply appear. It also means there's no gap between "the bank shows it" and "BalanceMCP knows about it" caused by sync delay — the gap instead comes from how recently a statement was actually imported.

A future bank feed, if one is built, would presumably still respect the same underlying rules everything else does — balanced entries, an append-only journal, no posting into a locked period — since those are enforced at the database level regardless of where a transaction originates. What's genuinely absent today is the automatic connection itself, not the safeguards that would govern it.