By Niki Taylor and Rohan Sriram.
Business financial tools are empowering small businesses with smarter money management, from real-time cash flow visibility to automated bookkeeping. But building these experiences has often required extra work from our customers to turn raw transaction data into cleansed, categorized, and usable insights for businesses.
That’s why Plaid is introducing Transactions for Business—a new solution from Plaid that makes it easier to turn business bank account data into actionable insights. With expanded coverage, account type indicators, and purpose-built categorization, business financial tools can more easily deliver real-time visibility and smarter automation for small businesses.
Support more small businesses, no matter where they bank
Your customers shouldn’t have to worry about whether their business bank account is supported—and now, they don’t have to. Plaid supports business checking, savings, and credit accounts from 95% of U.S. banks that serve small businesses. That means your customers can connect business accounts from over 4,500 financial institutions today. For existing Plaid customers, these new integrations are live with no additional work required.
In addition, we’ve made it easier for you to know whether the bank account linked from your customer is a business or personal account with our account indicator. This helps ensure your workflows, risk models, and experiences are tailored for the right account type.
Access business-specific transaction categorization
Until now, most Plaid transaction data has been optimized for personal use cases. That meant our customers serving businesses often had to interpret raw transaction strings or build their own categorization logic. We’re changing that. In our Transactions API, we’re introducing a categorization model specifically designed for businesses. Now in beta, this model includes 13 purpose-built business categories to help you better understand your customers’ overall finances, from inflows to outflows. Our new categories include, but aren’t limited to:
- Revenue – know exactly where the money is coming from
- Payroll – understand a business’s labor costs
- Loan payments – keep tabs on debt
These categories are built on our AI model trained on the Plaid network, which sees trillions of transactions. They’re tested with real business transaction data to unlock relevant insights from every transaction.
Build the next generation of small business tools
Companies like Brex, Bluevine, and Wave are already using Plaid’s existing Transactions product to deliver real-time spend tracking, smarter capital access, and automated bookkeeping to businesses. We’ve connected tens of millions of business accounts to companies like these, and that number grows every day.
With enriched business transaction data from Plaid, you can more quickly and accurately offer business owners the relevant insights they need to take action. Whether you’re helping automate accounting, streamline tax prep, forecast cash flow, or power faster lending decisions, these updates give you the foundation to build more intelligent financial tools that scale with your customers.
This is just the beginning. Throughout the year, we have an exciting roadmap ahead to better support business financial use cases.
Photo credit: NRSPro/Shutterstock
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Tags: Accounting, Technology
