Get Your Money Into Tether-Zero: Bank Linking, File Imports, and Auto-Categorization

The fastest door is the Connect Your Bank page. It walks you through Plaid — the connection service used across the finance industry — to link your institution in a couple of minutes — the page even explains its own pipeline in three words: connect, sync, categorize. The security model is worth spelling out, and the app does, right on the page: your banking credentials are handled by Plaid, never stored by Tether-Zero, and the connection is read-only. Tether-Zero can see transactions and balances; nobody can move your money from inside a budgeting app.

Once linked, new transactions are imported automatically and updated daily, with a Sync all accounts button for the reconciliation nights when you want the freshest data on demand. Everything that arrives this way wears a Linked badge, and its date, amount, and payee are protected — your bank is the source of truth, so those fields can't drift. Two honest notes: bank sync is a premium add-on, and linking is for household Admins and Editors. If you ever disconnect, the account simply becomes a manual one — every transaction you've synced stays.

Switching from another budgeting app, or starting from a pile of bank statement exports? Tap Import on the Transactions page and the Import Transactions wizard takes CSV, OFX, or QFX files up to 5MB and walks three steps: upload the file and pick the destination account, preview the first rows, and review the results. There's no column-mapping puzzle to solve — the columns are detected automatically on the server.

The import is built to be hard to regret. Duplicates are detected and skipped automatically, so re-importing an overlapping statement won't double your history. The import only ever adds transactions — it never modifies or deletes what's already there. And the results screen tells you exactly what happened: how many rows imported, how many were skipped, and why, down to the row.

Getting transactions in is half the job; putting them in the right category is the other half. That's where Smart Match earns its name. When you pick a payee you've used before, a Suggested category chip appears with your usual category for that payee — accept it with one click, or dismiss it and choose another. Either way, you keep the final say.

The clever part is what happens when you override: the rule updates. Categorize your grocery store differently once, and Smart Match learns your correction for next time. The rules are your household's own — built from your history, not everyone else's — and a suggestion only appears when the match is confident (above 80%), so the chip stays helpful instead of noisy — staying silent when it isn't sure is part of the design.

Automation never gets to write your record unsupervised. Transactions that arrive from your bank land in a Pending review state: recognized ones you Accept, unrecognized ones you Reject — with an explicit confirmation, since rejecting deletes the transaction permanently. Both happen inline on the transaction row, and bulk accept exists for the Monday-morning pile.

Accepted transactions can later be marked Cleared as you check them against a statement — the modern version of balancing a checkbook. The result is a register you actually trust: nothing enters your budget without passing under your eyes, and nothing unrecognized gets to sit there polluting your reports.

Once the pipes are connected, momentum builds fast. Give the first batch of imported transactions categories — Smart Match makes the second batch faster than the first — and then put the data to work: build your first budget on numbers that are real rather than remembered. That's the difference between budgeting from memory and budgeting from evidence.

From there, the rest of Tether-Zero wakes up. Fresh transactions power the pacing math that catches overspending early, feed the insights dashboard, and give Zero, the AI coach, real numbers to answer with. Every one of those features is only as current as your transaction data — which is exactly why getting your money in is step one.