Bank Sync (SimpleFIN)

Afford syncs with your banks through SimpleFIN — a small, privacy-respecting protocol built for exactly this. You connect your banks once to SimpleFIN Bridge; Afford then reads transactions through it with a read-only token. Afford never sees your banking passwords, and there’s no Afford server in the middle — your device talks to SimpleFIN directly.

Bank sync is an Afford Pro feature. SimpleFIN Bridge is a separate service with its own small subscription; Afford Pro is what lets Afford talk to it. Without either, you can keep your budget entirely by hand — see Tracking by hand instead below.

Why SimpleFIN?

• Read-only by design. The access token can fetch balances and transactions; it cannot move money.
• You hold the keys. You create the connection and you can revoke it at the bridge any time.
• Cheap and independent. SimpleFIN Bridge is a small paid service run independently of any app — the same connection can feed other tools you use.

Step 1: Create your SimpleFIN Bridge account

1. Go to bridge.simplefin.org and sign up.
2. Connect your banks there (it uses established aggregators under the hood to talk to thousands of institutions).
3. In the bridge dashboard, choose New App and copy the setup token it generates — a long block of text.

Step 2: Connect Afford

1. In Afford, open Settings → Bank sync (SimpleFin) — Settings is the gear button at the end of every tab’s toolbar (on the Mac, Afford → Settings). You can also get there from the Accounts tab: Link with SimpleFin in its + menu.
2. Paste the setup token into the field and tap Connect.

The token is exchanged once for an access URL, which is stored in your device’s Keychain — never in a file, never on any server of ours. (It’s also mirrored, encrypted, into your private iCloud so your other devices can sync without re-pasting the token.)

Step 3: Choose your accounts

After the first download, Afford lists every account the bank reports for the first time. For each one you pick:

• Add as a new account in Afford,
• one of the accounts you’d already been tracking by hand or imported — Afford suggests the likely match, and the history merges with no double-counting — or
• Don’t track this account.

Then tap Finish setting up. Afterward the same screen lists Accounts in your budget, each with a switch. Switched off, an account isn’t shown, counted or synced, and its transactions leave the budget; switch it back on and they come back.

Accounts you keep can still be marked off-budget (Edit account → On budget): tracked and visible, but not feeding Available to Allocate — right for a savings account you don’t spend from, or investments along for the ride.

If you use multiple budgets, each budget picks its own subset of accounts — the same card can be in your personal plan and not the household one.

Syncing

Afford refreshes automatically at most every 6 hours (when it opens or comes back to the foreground), and you can ask for one extra refresh in between — pull down on the Accounts tab, or Sync now in the Accounts + menu or the SimpleFin screen. This isn’t a limitation for fun: SimpleFIN asks apps to stay under 24 requests a day, and Afford is a good citizen — it also shares one download across all your budgets, so switching budgets never spends a request.

Bank sync runs on the budget owner’s devices. If a budget is shared with you, you see everything the owner’s sync brings in and can categorize it, but your devices never contact the bank. The demo budget never syncs either.

What comes in with each sync:

• New transactions, filed by your payee rules where they match — against the payee and the bank’s raw description
• Balance updates and pending → posted transitions, merged automatically
• The routine mess — tips, duplicates, transfers, card payments — reconciled or flagged for review
• Bills whose payment showed up roll their due dates forward

If Pro lapses, nothing is lost: the connection, your accounts and their transactions all stay; they just stop updating until you upgrade again.

Disconnecting

Settings → Bank sync (SimpleFin) → Disconnect SimpleFin. Your accounts and transactions stay exactly as they are; they just stop updating. This also removes the iCloud copy of the connection. To cut the cord completely, also delete the app connection at the SimpleFIN Bridge dashboard.

Tracking by hand instead

You don’t need bank sync to use Afford — on the Free plan or simply by preference, a budget kept by hand works the same way:

• Add accounts with Add account manually in the Accounts tab’s + menu.
• Add transactions with the + on Activity, Plan or Spend, or an envelope’s Spend action. Afford remembers each payee’s envelope, account and last amount, so repeats take a couple of taps, and payee rules file them for you.
• Let recurring bills record themselves on their due date, from the account you choose.
• Pay a card with Record payment on its account page — see Credit Cards.

The details are in Activity & Transactions. And if you connect SimpleFIN later, link each bank account to the one you’ve been keeping and the histories merge.