BudgetSheet v2.0

After a long time without a big update, BudgetSheet v2.0 is finally here. BudgetSheet v2.0 will be released THIS WEEKEND.

Quick Overview of Changes

• End-user Plaid Accounts are no longer required or able to be used with BudgetSheet (to stay in compliance with Plaid's terms of service)
• No more auto-sorting transactions and logs by date - they are always appended to the end of the sheet now
• Account balances are now updated every time you fetch transactions
• BudgetSheet is faster and more stable

Changes to Plaid Integrations and Setup

This is a major code update that changes the way Plaid integrations work. You will no longer have to signup for your own Plaid account to use BudgetSheet. It is now all built-in. According to Plaid's terms of service, this approach should not have been used to begin with. This update is a major course-correct that fixes that part of BudgetSheet.

A Faster, More Stable BudgetSheet

The net result of changing the Plaid integration is that BudgetSheet should also be faster and more stable. Plaid will no longer have to review and approve your individual developer account before everything works well. A lot of the code that does the "heavy lifting" was also moved out of BudgetSheet and into a new high-performance web service that can run code orders of magnitude faster than it was running in Google's sandboxed processes.

Reconnect Your Accounts (Sorry)

The downside of having to make these adjustments is that you will have to reconnect all your accounts, and transactions you have imported will no longer match up with the same transactionIds as the ones you will import from here on out (because the bank account will be linked through a different Plaid account). This means you may end up with a lot of duplicate transactions when you first import using your new linked bank accounts. There is no way around this, because these changes were required for BudgetSheet to stay in compliance with Plaid's terms of service.

Going Forward (v2 and beyond)

While this shift in painful for current users now, this is a one-time deal. You will not be forced to re-connect all your accounts like this again. Furthermore since I am maintaining and monitoring the new web service behind BudgetSheet, I am now able to have a lot more insight into things that go wrong, and can help troubleshoot issues a lot more effectively going forward.

Several more feature updates are planned to BudgetSheet in the near future with the most requested features, and now that this update is released, I will be able to follow up with quicker, smaller updates a lot more easily.

THANK YOU for being a BudgetSheet customer. I really appreciate your financial support in the past, and look forward to a continued business relationship in the future as well.

• Vance L