Integrating Plaid

Many FinTechs already leverage Plaid to aggregate their users' bank transactions. Hurdlr lets you build directly on top of your Plaid integration, using your API keys.

1. How it works

Through Hurdlr's Plaid integration, your user's transactions are pulled into Hurdlr as soon as Plaid makes them available. All of those transactions are then run through Hurdlr's proprietary algorithms, which leverage the user's business type, accountant best practices, and the behavior of similar businesses within the Hurdlr app's 700k+ users.

That data can then be instantly leveraged throughout Hurdlr's APIs, which include expense categorization, tax categorization, financial statements, tax estimates, tax reporting, tax filing, and many other features.

You can also quickly and easily embed Hurdlr's white-labelled UI into your product, which automatically leverages the data from your Plaid integration.

2. Creating a Plaid Team

If you haven't already done so, you should create a Plaid account, and then create a Team for your app.

3. Securely sharing your Plaid keys

In your Plaid Dashboard, to view your API keys, click on Team Settings -> Keys. Contact us directly at [email protected] for instructions on how to securely share your Plaid keys.

Our API team will confirm once your keys are live in the Hurdlr API, so you can quickly move onto the next step.

4. Plaid Link (user interface)

You can quickly and easily use Hurdlr's Embeddable User Interface for Expense Tracking, which includes all the necessary UI for account linking. This approach gets your product up and running in less than a day, and is a great starting place.

Alternatively, if your product already incorporates Plaid Link, or if you decide in the future that you would like to use Plaid Link on your own, then you can easily do so via the following steps:

In your Plaid Dashboard, in the Link Customization Settings, be sure to enable the Account Select functionality.
After implementing the Plaid Link Flow inside your app, you will ultimately receive an access_token. To associate that access_token with your user's Hurdlr account, simply POST that access token to the /plaidAccessToken endpoint:

curl \
  --request POST \
  --url https://sandbox.hurdlr.com/rest/v5/banks/plaidAccessToken \
  --header 'Authorization: Bearer ${access_token}' \
  --header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  --data '{
    "plaidAccessToken": "${plaid_access_token}"
  }'

The above POST call can be repeated for as many institutions as needed by your user.

5. Plaid webhooks (real-time updates)

When your user links their bank accounts via your Plaid Link flow, you will receive Plaid webhooks on your own server. Once you receive those webhooks on your server, to ensure the data available to you is automatically kept up to date, you should forward those webhooks to the Hurdlr API.

Item webhooks and Transaction webhooks from Plaid's "sandbox" environment should be forwarded directly from your server to https://webhook.sandbox.hurdlr.com/plaid. For the "production" environment, they should be forwarded to https://webhook.prod.hurdlr.com/plaid.

6. Next Steps

After your user has linked their accounts in the Embeddable User Interface or after you POST the user's Plaid access_token to the Hurdlr API, Hurdlr will automatically begin ingesting transactions from the user's linked accounts. All of Hurdlr's Expense Tracking features will immediately become available to your user, both in the Embeddable User Interface and via API.

Whether you are building your own UX from scratch or have some existing functionality that you are looking to enhance, the Hurdlr API team is here to help. Don't hesitate to email us at [email protected], and we would be glad to help you create and complete the best next steps for your product and vision.