The first step towards downloading transaction data is to establish a connection between your financial institution and LedgerLinker. This process can done through the LedgerLinker website Login here.

After you have logged in, navigate to the “Financial Links” page. If you had previously established a link with one of your financial institution, it will be listed here. If not, select “Add a new financial institution.” On the next page, you will be prompted to give the link a nickname and to select the types of accounts you want to connect. There are four types of accounts supported by LedgerLinker:

Type Description
Depository Bank accounts
Credit Credit Cards

Note: Be careful about selecting account types of which you don’t have at the desired institution- Some institutions don’t support all types and may not show up on subsequent search screens if they don’t support all of the types you select. If you can’t find your financial institution on the next page, go back to the “Financial Link” list and edit your link and uncheck the unneeded account types.

Click create and you will be redirected to the link page where you select your financial instution and then are either prompted for your credentials or redirected to the bank to authorize the link.

If you have questions about the security of your credentials or what information we store click here to learn more about LedgerLinkers security practices and data policies.

2. Select Accounts to Export

3. Install the LedgerLinker Client

Alright, now that you’ve gained access to your financial institution’s transaction data, the next step is to get it into the Plain-Text-Accounting (PTA) journal on your computer.

The LedgerLinker client runs on your computer and talks to our service to download all your selected accounts’ transaction data. The client automatically keeps track of the last downloaded transaction and adds new ones each time you run it. This means you can automate the addition of new transactions from your financial institution and say goodbye to the tedious manual download step of your existing accounting process.

Request for feedback: Hey, LedgerLinker is still pretty new, and we’d love to hear your thoughts on how we can make this process even better for you. If you’re stuck or have any suggestions, feel free to shoot us an email at help@ledgerlinker.com. We’ll get back to you ASAP and help you sort things out. We’re PTA enthusiasts ourselves, and we’d love to talk about the best ways to do personal or business accounting!

The LedgerLinker client is a small Python application, much like Beancount, a popular PTA tool. You’ll need to have python installed to use it. But don’t worry if you don’t have python yet - you can head over to this page to get your python environment set up in no time!

pip install ledgerlinker-client

If you’re a tech-savvy person who loves digging into code, you can check out the client’s code here: https://github.com/LedgerLinker/ledgerlinker-client.

Note: Is python not your thing? Are you looking for a better way to make this work? No worries! Just shoot us an email at help@ledgerlinker.com and let’s discuss how we can make this work with other tools or programming languages. We’re always excited to hear from you!