Link Your Brokerage with Plaid

Pro accounts can link a brokerage through Plaid, the connection service used across the finance industry. Once linked, your holdings, transactions, and dividends flow in automatically — no manual upkeep.

How Linking Works

1. On the Portfolio page, choose to link a brokerage (from the Settings tab or the add-account flow).
2. A Plaid window opens. Pick your brokerage and sign in inside Plaid's window.
3. Choose which accounts to share. Each one appears in your portfolio and starts syncing.

If a newly linked account looks like a manual account you were already tracking, we offer a guided merge — your dividend history and Initial Dollars Invested carry over, and the manual copy is retired so totals aren't double-counted.

What Syncs

• Holdings and cash — positions and balances, with live prices layered on during the day.
• Transactions — buys, sells, and transfers, with roughly two years of history backfilled at link time. That history also reconstructs your value chart back in time.
• Dividends — payments are detected and attributed into your income log automatically, including whether they were reinvested.

Syncs run automatically — at least every six hours, and sooner whenever your brokerage reports activity. You don't trigger anything.

Adding More Accounts from a Brokerage You Already Linked

Don't link the same brokerage login twice. Some brokerages — Charles Schwab, notably — only keep their newest connection updated, so signing in again from scratch creates a duplicate connection and quietly freezes the original one. Instead, use your existing connection: when you start linking with a connection already in place, we ask first and offer Add Accounts, which reopens Plaid on that connection so you can change which accounts it shares.

If a Connection Stops Receiving Data

If a brokerage stops sharing data with one of your connections (usually because the same login was linked again — see above), we flag it: the connection shows Stopped receiving data in Settings, and a notice on the portfolio page tells you when the data froze. Your holdings stay visible at their last synced values. Choose Reconnect on the connection you want to keep — you'll re-approve it at your brokerage and can re-share all of your accounts — and disconnect any duplicates you didn't mean to keep.

Where Your Credentials Go

Honest and simple: your brokerage username and password are entered with Plaid, never with Dividend Data. We never see, transmit, or store them. What we receive from Plaid is read-only account data — positions, balances, transactions. Nobody can trade or move money through this connection.

Disconnecting or Converting to Manual

From the Settings tab you can convert a linked account to manual — it keeps its holdings and history and becomes editable by hand, useful if you leave that brokerage or Pro — or disconnect it entirely, which removes the connection and deletes its synced accounts and holdings (your combined value-history chart keeps the past). When in doubt, convert.

If you later relink the same accounts, the new link rebuilds the same value history the kept chart already shows — so you'd see the period counted twice. When that happens, a prompt offers to remove the old copies with one click; removing them only cleans up the chart history, never holdings or dividends. History of an account you genuinely left (with no overlapping replacement) is left alone.

You can also delete a single linked account directly, just like a manual one, from Manage Accounts or Settings. It won't be re-imported by the connection's automatic sync, and if it was the last account on that connection, the connection is disconnected for you too.

Coming from the Old Terminal

Brokerage links from the previous version of Dividend Data ran on a different connection service and can't carry over. You'll see a one-time notice — re-link through Plaid once, and the guided merge reunites the new connection with your migrated history. Details in Coming from the Old Terminal.