Introduction to Transactions

Transactions data can be useful for many different applications, including personal finance management, expense reporting, cash flow modeling, risk analysis, and more. Plaid's Transactions product allows you to access a user's transaction history for depository type accounts such as checking and savings accounts, credit type accounts such as credit cards, and student loan accounts. For transaction history from investment accounts, use Plaid's Investments product.

Transactions data includes transaction date, amount, category, merchant, location, and more. Transaction data is lightly cleaned to populate the name field, and more thoroughly processed to populate the merchant_name field.

1{
2  "account_id": "BxBXxLj1m4HMXBm9WZZmCWVbPjX16EHwv99vp",
3  "amount": 2307.21,
4  "iso_currency_code": "USD",
5  "unofficial_currency_code": null,
6  "category": ["Shops", "Computers and Electronics"],
7  "category_id": "19013000",
8  "check_number": null,
9  "date": "2017-01-29",
10  "authorized_date": "2017-01-27",
11  "location": {
12    "address": "300 Post St",
13    "city": "San Francisco",
14    "region": "CA",
15    "postal_code": "94108",
16    "country": "US",
17    "lat": 40.740352,
18    "lon": -74.001761,
19    "store_number": "1235"
20  },
21  "name": "Apple Store",
22  "merchant_name": "Apple",
23  "payment_meta": {
24    "by_order_of": null,
25    "payee": null,
26    "payer": null,
27    "payment_method": null,
28    "payment_processor": null,
29    "ppd_id": null,
30    "reason": null,
31    "reference_number": null
32  },
33  "payment_channel": "in store",
34  "pending": false,
35  "pending_transaction_id": null,
36  "account_owner": null,
37  "transaction_id": "lPNjeW1nR6CDn5okmGQ6hEpMo4lLNoSrzqDje",
38  "transaction_code": null,
39  "transaction_type": "place"
40}

Transactions data is not static. As time passes, your users will make new transactions, and transactions they made in the past will change as they are processed by the financial institution. To learn more about how transactions are processed and can change, see Transaction states.

Plaid checks for updated transactions data multiple times per day and uses webhooks to inform you of any changes so you can keep your app up to date. For more detail on how to listen and respond to these webhooks, see Transaction webhooks.

Try out the Pattern Demo for a demonstration of a sample app that uses Plaid's Transactions product for the personal financial management use case to calculate and display a customer's net worth and spending habits and allows them to link multiple financial institutions.

For a more robust example of an app that incorporates transactions, see the Node-based Plaid Pattern sample app. Pattern is a sample financial management app that fetches transactions data upon receipt of transactions webhooks. Transactions code in Plaid Pattern can be found in handleTransactionsWebhook.js.

To get started building with Transactions, see Add Transactions to your App.