Plaid vs. QuickBooks: Why TenantPoint Uses Both

Plaid: what's actually in the bank, right now

Plaid is TenantPoint's read-only bank-connectivity feature. It's separate from the QuickBooks integration and works whether or not QuickBooks is even connected. You connect a real bank account once from the Banking screen, and every transaction that clears — a rent deposit, a vendor debit, a bank fee — syncs into TenantPoint automatically, the same day it posts.

TenantPoint then tries to match each incoming transaction to a tenant's open charge. A match only applies automatically when a strong signal — like an exact amount match to one open charge — is corroborated by a second signal, such as the tenant's name showing up in the transaction description or a pattern from a prior matched deposit. A single signal alone, or a transaction with more than one plausible match, gets held for a person to resolve. There's no automatic fallback that picks for you, even after the transaction clears. Tagging a transaction to a vendor or a work order for CAM eligibility works differently — that's always a deliberate step a person takes, never something TenantPoint auto-assigns on its own.

• Read-only — Plaid never initiates a transfer or moves money on its own
• Syncs the same day a transaction actually clears at the bank
• Auto-matches an incoming deposit to a tenant's open charge, given two corroborating signals
• Vendor and work-order tagging are a separate, always-manual step — never auto-assigned
• An ambiguous match sits in a queue for a person, indefinitely — it's never auto-resolved

QuickBooks: the formal books, on their own schedule

QuickBooks only receives what TenantPoint pushes to it — one direction, never the reverse: generated rent and CAM invoices, confirmed payments applied against those invoices, and work-order-linked expenses once a bank transaction has been manually reconciled and tagged. Nothing shows up in QuickBooks until that operational step — generating the invoice, confirming the payment, tagging the expense to a work order — has actually happened.

That makes QuickBooks a step behind Plaid by design, not by accident. It's the record your CPA pulls for a tax return or a lender package, not the place to check whether a specific check cleared this morning. And if an accountant edits a pushed record directly in QuickBooks, TenantPoint detects that as a conflict and flags it for a person to accept or ignore — it never silently overwrites their work.

• Only three things ever push: invoices, payments, and reconciled work-order expenses
• They arrive as a QuickBooks Invoice, Payment, and Purchase respectively
• Nothing pushes until a human step — confirm, reconcile, or tag — has already happened
• An accountant's direct edit in QuickBooks is flagged as a conflict, never silently overwritten

The same $1,422, seen two different ways

Here's how that plays out on a realistic work order. Say a $1,422 debit hits your bank account for a plumbing repair on Tuesday morning. Plaid shows it in TenantPoint by Tuesday afternoon — the money is gone, and that's simply a fact about the bank account now. QuickBooks shows nothing yet, because nothing has been reconciled or tagged to a work order.

On Thursday, someone reconciles that transaction and tags it to the plumbing work order. Only then does TenantPoint push it to QuickBooks as a Purchase, with the expense category set on the line and the property set at the header. QuickBooks now shows a $1,422 categorized expense — two days after Plaid already showed the money leaving. That gap isn't a bug in either system. It's the actual difference between a bank feed and an accounting ledger.

Why the onboarding flow asks for both

TenantPoint asks new users to connect Plaid and QuickBooks as two separate steps because they answer two separate questions an owner actually has: did the money move, and what do the books say. Skip Plaid and TenantPoint has no live signal for tenant payments or vendor expenses until someone enters them by hand — you lose same-day visibility. Skip QuickBooks and TenantPoint still operates fine as your system of record, but your accountant has no formal ledger to pull from at tax time, because nothing is pushing into their software.

Neither connection configures the other. QuickBooks setup is its own one-time process — OAuth, then a wizard covering tracking mode, property and category mappings, tenant and vendor mappings, and sync policy — completely independent of whether Plaid is connected at all. Most owners end up wanting both: Plaid for the real-time picture, QuickBooks for the formal one.

• Plaid: connect once from the Banking screen, live from that point forward
• QuickBooks: connect via OAuth, then complete a one-time setup wizard
• Each connection is independent — neither one configures or requires the other
• Most owners connect both eventually, but neither is required to use TenantPoint day to day