Akcha connects to your bank on a read-only basis and shows you what your money is doing. This page answers the questions that come up most — including the ones where Akcha behaves in a way worth explaining.
What Akcha is, and what it will never do.
It links your financial accounts through Plaid and brings the balances and transactions together in one place — then categorizes the spending, finds your recurring charges, tracks budgets and goals, and tells you what changed.
Akcha is read-only. It cannot move, hold, send, or spend your money, and it never has permission to. It is a window on your accounts, not a bank.
Go to Settings → Linked institutions and connect your bank there — a brand-new account also offers it right on the dashboard. Plaid’s secure window opens, you choose your institution and sign in there. Akcha asks for up to 365 days of history — how much actually arrives is up to your bank — so the first sync takes a minute and the app has real numbers to work with from day one.
Some institutions — many pensions, group RRSPs, and insurance-held investments among them — are simply not reachable through Plaid. For those, add a manual account from Accounts and enter the balance yourself. It counts toward your net worth like any other account; you just update it when it changes.
Where most questions actually come from.
Almost certainly not. Banks don’t publish transactions continuously — they post them in batches, and most publish once a day. TD Canada Trust, for example, refreshes overnight, so a coffee you bought this afternoon may not exist anywhere Akcha can reach it until tomorrow morning.
3 during your free trial, and 10 on Akcha Pro. Each institution counts once, no matter how many chequing, savings, or card accounts it holds.
There is a second, monthly cap on how many bank connections you can have in a month — 4 on the trial and 15 on Pro. It counts every bank that was connected at any point that month, including ones you have since removed, and resets at the start of each month. It exists because a connection costs us for the whole month it existed in, and it leaves room to link the wrong account and fix it. If you have hit it, everything already connected keeps working.
Banks expire the permission you granted, and some require you to re-approve every few months. It isn’t an error and nothing is lost. Akcha shows a Reconnect prompt on Accounts, and marks the affected accounts in the list; reconnecting reopens your bank on the same connection, so your history stays exactly where it is and you are not charged again.
Settings → Linked institutions, then the ⋯ menu on the institution → Remove. That ends the connection at Plaid, so no further data is collected.
When a trial or a paid period ends, we email you the date your account will be deleted: 7 days later. If you haven’t subscribed by then, we delete it — its bank connections and all of its data. We email you again 3 days before it happens, and the date is on the subscription screen whenever you sign in. You can also delete the account yourself from that screen. An App Store subscription that Apple is still trying to renew doesn’t count as ended. An account that never starts a subscription is treated the same way, counted from 7 days after it was created.
How Akcha sorts your spending — and how you overrule it.
Akcha does, as each transaction arrives, from the merchant and the bank’s own description. It is right most of the time and openly unsure the rest of it: anything it can’t place with confidence is collected in Needs a decision (Needs your input in older versions of the iPhone app) — the banner at the top of your transaction list — filed under Uncategorized until you decide, and grouped by merchant, so one answer files every charge waiting under that name. If a new one arrives that Akcha still can’t place, it asks you again rather than guessing. How each transaction then counts — income, spending, or neither — follows your money rules in Settings.
Open it and change the category — from Transactions, or straight from the bar in Budgets. Your choice wins permanently for that transaction. To change how it counts rather than where it’s filed — income, other money in or a refund — use Counts as when you open it from your transaction list.
Yes. Add one wherever you set a category, and it sits alongside the built-in ones everywhere in the app — budgets and insights included.
For a whole month, Transactions and the dashboard give the same totals. Money in, Money out and Net count income, other money in and spending the way the dashboard does: refunds come off what they refund (or count the way your money rules say), and transfers between your own accounts stay in the list but aren’t counted. The note under the cards says how much was left out. Over part of a month, a refund for something bought before the first day has no spending in those days to come off, so it counts as other money in.
By default it comes off the spending it reverses: a return filed under Shopping lowers Shopping. If a refund is bigger than what you spent in that category that month, the rest counts as other money in. In Settings → Money rules you can count refunds as income instead, or not count them at all. Money that arrives as Uncategorized is a deposit Akcha can’t name yet: it shows as other money in — counted in your net, not as income — until you say what it is, unless your money rules count it as income.
Money that came in but isn’t income: a deposit Akcha can’t name yet; the part of a refund bigger than what you spent in its category that month; money back on a credit card that isn’t the refund of a purchase, such as a credit filed under Income, or the part of one filed under Uncategorized beyond that month’s Uncategorized spending; or — if your money rules count only your pay — any other deposit. It counts toward your net and what you kept, but not as income. It can be negative in a month when money that came in earlier is taken back.
Yes — open the transaction and switch on Exclude from totals (called Exclude from budget in older versions of the iPhone app). It leaves every total, budget and average, and stays in your list, in Recurring and upcoming bills and pay, and in Needs a decision. For money someone paid you back, file it under the category it repays and set Counts as to Refund, so it lowers that spending whatever your money rules say.
What the numbers on these screens are actually measuring.
A budget is a limit per category per period. Akcha reads it as a ledger: what came in, what went out, what’s left, and — when you open a category — the individual transactions behind the figure, where you can correct any that don’t belong.
Because that date is an estimate, not a scheduled payment. Akcha finds recurring charges by watching your history; when a merchant bills on a steady day of the month, the date is firm. When it wanders — a bill that lands anywhere across three weeks — Akcha shows the date dotted and says what it was inferred from.
Detection works from repetition, so a few regular payments can look like a subscription when they aren’t. Search for the merchant on Transactions to see the charges it was built from. Akcha can’t hide a single item; once the payments stop, it moves to Stopped and leaves the monthly total.
Yes, when it’s paying something down. Link the goal to a card or loan and set the target to $0: the goal follows the balance down and is reached the moment it hits $0. A savings goal needs a target above $0.
What lands in your inbox, and how to stop it.
Account essentials: confirming your address, resetting your password, a welcome note when you join, the emails about an ended account before and after it is deleted, and — once you subscribe — receipts and payment notices from Stripe, our payment processor, or from Apple for App Store purchases. And, if it’s switched on, the weekly summary: what last week cost, where you stand, and what’s coming, sent Monday mornings. Nothing else. Akcha never emails marketing.
Settings → Notifications, or the unsubscribe link at the bottom of any summary — that link works without signing in.
Because there is nothing yet to compare it to. Akcha records your total position when it sends each summary, so from the second one onward the change is two measured figures — never a guess dressed up as a measurement.
One plan.
Akcha Pro is a monthly subscription. The price is shown before you subscribe, together with any sales tax, GST or HST. There is no free plan.
It depends on the trial. If it didn’t ask for a payment method, access ends unless you subscribe, and nothing is charged. If it’s an App Store introductory offer, Apple starts the subscription and charges you when it ends, unless you cancel at least 24 hours before. If access ends and you haven’t subscribed within 7 days of the email saying so, the account and its data are deleted.
If you subscribed in the iPhone app, Apple charges you and sends the receipt. Otherwise Bilsis Information Systems and Technologies Inc., a Canadian company, charges you through Stripe: your card statement shows AKCHA.APP, and the emailed receipt is headed with the company name instead, because a receipt has to carry the legal entity behind the product. Both are us.
Cancel where you subscribed. In the iPhone app: Settings → Plan & billing → Manage subscription, or your iPhone’s Settings → your name → Subscriptions. On the website: Settings → Plan & billing → Cancel subscription. Either way you keep Pro until the end of the period you’ve paid for.
The short version. The full version is the Privacy Policy.
No — never. You enter it with Plaid and your bank, in their window. Akcha receives a token that reads account data and nothing else, and that token is encrypted, with its key kept apart from the database.
Every account is isolated at the database level, so one account can only ever read its own rows. We don’t sell your information and we don’t use your bank data for advertising.
Settings → Delete account. It removes your data and disconnects your banks at Plaid, so no further information is collected about you. It cannot be undone.
Email support@akcha.app and a person will reply. Telling us which screen you were on and roughly when it happened gets you a real answer faster than a screenshot alone.