How to Connect Bank Accounts to Prosaic

Bank transactions come into Prosaic through secure open-banking connections. This guide explains who can connect accounts, how the connection works between Prosaic, Akahu and your bank, and how connected accounts are assigned to entities.

How bank connections work in Prosaic

Open banking changes the order bank feeds are set up. The bank account holder first authorises access directly with their bank, usually through their mobile banking app and, as more banks support it, through internet banking.

In Prosaic, this means a user can connect and authorise one or more bank accounts first, then their accountant can assign those accounts to the relevant entities.

For a client, the usual flow is:

Invite client → client connects bank accounts → assign accounts to entities

Workspace users can follow the same process for bank accounts they hold themselves.

This is different from systems such as Xero, where you typically create an organisation, add a bank account, then request a bank feed for that individual account. In Prosaic, users can connect multiple accounts at once and then assign each one to the appropriate entity.

Read more below on how to assign multple client bank accounts to different entities

Who can connect bank accounts

Anyone with a Prosaic login can connect the bank accounts they hold themselves. There are two types of user:

• Workspace (practice) users, meaning Owners, Admins and Advisors, who manage the accounting work.
• Client users, meaning Clients and Standard Users, who own the businesses you do the books for.

An email address can only belong to one user type.

If you need bank feeds from a client, invite them using an email address they have access to. They'll use it to sign up, authorise their banks through Akahu, and manage those accounts from their own dashboard. You then assign the accounts to an entity. Client users don't have admin workspace access.

If the accounts are yours, for example a rental property you own or a business of your own, connect them under your normal work login. You no longer need to invite yourself as a client on a second email address.

Why it works this way: bank feeds run on open banking, so the account holder has to actively authorise access in their own banking app (for example ANZ goMoney), just like authorising Xero or Microsoft. There's no form to sign on someone else's behalf, which is why you can only connect accounts you hold yourself.

Connecting bank accounts

How you go about it depends on who holds the accounts.

The client holds the accounts

When you add a client, send them an invitation. They complete a short onboarding and connect their bank feeds securely through Akahu, authorising access in their banking app. Clients connect during initial onboarding, and can add or manage accounts at any time from their client dashboard. Once the accounts are connected, you assign them to an entity.

Learn more about the client onboarding flow in this article

You hold the accounts

Use your normal work login. There are three steps: connect the feed, show your accounts in the entity's Bank Accounts list, then select the accounts.

Step 1. Connect the feed. Open the menu at the bottom left of the sidebar (your name and email address) and choose My bank accounts.

Select Add bank account. Prosaic hands you to Akahu, where you choose your bank and authorise access in your banking app. When you come back, the accounts are listed here with a green Connected status. Use Manage on this page whenever you want to add or remove accounts later.

Step 2. Show your accounts. Go to Entities and open the entity the accounts belong to, or create a new one. At the foot of its Bank Accounts list, turn on Show my bank accounts. Your connected accounts then appear in the list above.

Step 3. Select the accounts. Tick each account this entity should use, or use Select all. The first time you select one of your own accounts, Prosaic asks you to confirm, because attaching it makes the account visible to everyone who can open the entity.

Save the entity. Transactions start importing against it, and you reconcile them exactly as you would any other feed.

If an account can't be connected, you can import bank statements manually instead. See How do I import bank transactions manually for a client?

Assigning accounts to entities

One login can authorise many bank accounts, and you assign each account to the relevant entity. A single entity can have more than one account. So a client with three companies and a trust is one client login, several connected accounts, assigned across the four entities. Each entity keeps its own chart of accounts, reports and GST.

An account belongs to one entity at a time. If you try to attach an account that's already on another entity, Prosaic will refuse rather than move it quietly.

How Prosaic, Akahu and your bank connect

• Akahu is a secure open-banking provider that sits between your bank and Prosaic, the intermediary that handles the bank connection.
• Transactions flow in: banks to Akahu to Prosaic.
• Set up and manage flows out: from Prosaic you're redirected to Akahu (and your bank) to add, remove or reconnect accounts.
• Authorise once, then connect any number of accounts and manage them at any time.
• Use the same email for your Akahu account and your Prosaic login, so Prosaic can hand you straight through to Akahu. Authorising under two different email addresses creates two separate Akahu users, which is a common cause of duplicate accounts.

When you still need a second login

One case is left over: a feed that no other advisor in the practice should see. Entities are visible across the firm, so attaching an account to one shares it with every advisor who can open that entity.

If the feed needs to stay private, connect it under a separate client login on a personal email address, and keep it on its own entity. See How do I create a private entity for practice staff? for the full setup.

For everything else, including a practice owner who is also a client of the firm, one work login is now enough.

Need help?

If you run into trouble connecting an account, use the 💬 button in the app or email help@prosaic.works. For a connection that has dropped or is showing the wrong status, start with the Bank Connections - Troubleshooting Guide.