A connection links a Trac portfolio to an outside account — a bank or brokerage login through Plaid, or a Google account for Drive — so the data keeps arriving on its own instead of being typed in or imported from a file. Once an institution is connected, its accounts, balances, positions and transactions flow into the portfolio and turn up as holdings, activities to review and prices.

This guide covers where connections live, how to link an institution, what happens after linking, how to sync one by hand, how to repair one that has stopped working, and how to remove one.

Find what you need#

Where connections live#

Open Settings and choose the Connections tab. Every connection the portfolio has is listed there, sorted by name.

Connections is an admin area. Portfolio wranglers don’t see the tab at all — their Settings screen has only Profile and Configurations — so if you need an institution linked and can’t see the tab, ask a portfolio admin.

Each row shows:

  • The institution’s name — the bank or brokerage for a Plaid connection, or Google for a Google one.
  • Last successful fetch — when Trac last pulled data in successfully, or Hasn’t run yet for a connection that has never completed a run.
  • A red flag icon, only when something is wrong with that connection. See Fix a connection that has stopped working.
  • Row actions on the right: re-run, edit, and remove.

If a connection has brought accounts into the portfolio, its row has a caret at the end and can be expanded. Click the row to open it and see the accounts that connection feeds, with a search box for narrowing a long list. Individual positions inside an account aren’t listed separately — they’re rolled up into the account that holds them.

Connect a bank or brokerage (through Plaid)#

Trac links bank and brokerage accounts through Plaid, which handles the institution’s login on your behalf. Trac never sees or stores your banking credentials.

  1. Go to Settings → Connections.
  2. Click Add Integration at the bottom of the list. The button is briefly disabled while Trac prepares the session.
  3. Plaid’s window opens. Search for your institution and pick it.
  4. Sign in with the credentials you’d use on the institution’s own site, and complete whatever second factor it asks for.
  5. Choose the accounts you want Trac to follow.

When Plaid finishes, it hands you back to Trac on an Add Plaid Integration screen, which creates the connection and immediately starts the first fetch. You’ll see a Success! popup confirming Connected to the institution while Trac pulls in your accounts and transactions, and you land back on Settings.

Closing Plaid’s window before you finish just cancels the attempt — nothing is created, and you can click Add Integration again.

If you’re told the login already exists#

If a connection already covers that login with overlapping accounts, Trac refuses to create a second one and tells you so, naming the existing connection. That’s deliberate: two connections to the same login would fetch the same accounts twice. To add or drop accounts on a login you’ve already connected, edit the existing connection instead — see Change which accounts a connection covers.

The first fetch is not instant, and the two halves of it arrive on different schedules:

  • Accounts appear within a few minutes.
  • Transactions can take up to an hour to fully land, because they arrive as the institution sends them over. A brand-new connection also waits out the institution’s initial backfill, so Trac schedules follow-up runs of its own rather than fetching once and stopping.

After that, connected accounts refresh on their own — you don’t have to come back and press anything.

What lands in the portfolio:

  • Holdings for the accounts you selected, with balances and positions.
  • Activities for the transactions that come in, waiting to be reviewed. See Activities.
  • Prices on connected positions, which is why a connected holding has no Add Price action of its own.

If accounts or transactions still haven’t appeared an hour after linking, or an account’s balance doesn’t match the real one, contact Trac support.

Once data is flowing, Data Operations is where you see it in aggregate: which accounts are connected, what’s waiting to be triaged, and which accounts disagree with their source.

Sync a connection by hand#

You don’t normally need to — connections run on their own — but you can force a fetch when you want to see something right away.

On the connection’s row, click the circular-arrows icon (its tooltip reads Re-run integration). It turns into a spinner while the run is in flight.

Two things to expect:

  • Google connections have no re-run button. A Google connection isn’t a data feed, so there’s nothing to fetch on demand.
  • A long run isn’t a failure. A manual run that takes longer than the app waits for keeps going in the background; the data still arrives. Check Last successful fetch on the row afterwards rather than watching the spinner.

Fix a connection that has stopped working#

A red flag icon on a connection’s row means Trac has recorded one or more unresolved issues on it. The most common cause is the institution having invalidated the login — a password change, an expired authorization, or a security check that needs answering again — which stops new data arriving until someone signs in again.

You may also hear about it before you open Settings: notifications fire when an account’s authorization expires, an account stops updating, or a connection is suspended.

To repair a Plaid connection, re-link it:

  1. Go to Settings → Connections.
  2. Click the pencil icon on the connection’s row.
  3. Plaid re-opens on that same login. Sign in and complete any check it asks for.
  4. Trac lands on an Update Plaid Integration screen and re-runs the connection straight away.

Re-linking keeps the connection and everything it has already brought in — it is a repair, not a fresh start, so you don’t end up with duplicate accounts or duplicate history.

If the flag comes back after a successful re-link, contact Trac support; the row’s own tooltip says the same.

Change which accounts a connection covers#

The pencil icon is also how you change the accounts a Plaid connection follows. Re-open it the same way and adjust the account selection inside Plaid — newly selected accounts start flowing into the portfolio, and this is the supported way to widen a login rather than adding a second connection for it.

Connect a Google account#

A Google connection is a different kind of thing: it doesn’t bring in accounts or transactions, it lets Traci work with the documents in a Google Drive folder.

Connecting it starts on a different tab:

  1. Go to Settings → Profile, with the Portfolio toggle selected.
  2. Find the Google Account row — described as Link Google to let Traci work with your Drive files — and click Connect.
  3. Sign in to Google and grant the access it asks for. Google returns you to Trac, which finishes creating the connection.

Once it exists, the row reads Connected, and the connection itself is managed from Settings → Connections, where it’s listed as Google.

A portfolio supports a single Google connection, so the Connect button disappears once one exists. To connect a different Google account, remove the existing connection in Connections first.

Choose the folder Traci may work in#

Click the pencil on the Google row to open Traci Folder Access. There you pick the one Drive folder Traci is allowed to work inside, and how much she may do in it:

  • Read only — Traci can find, open and summarize files in the folder. She can’t create, change or move anything.
  • Read + add — everything in Read only, plus creating new files, folders and decks, and appending to existing ones. Nothing already in the folder gets changed.
  • Full — everything in Read + add, plus moving, renaming and overwriting content that’s already there.

A folder you connect for the first time starts at Read + add, so Traci can file and draft immediately but can’t alter anything already in the folder until you opt into Full. Changing to a different folder keeps the level you were on. Both bounds — the folder and the access level — are enforced on Trac’s side, not just hidden in the interface.

You can also disconnect the folder from that screen without removing the Google connection itself.

Remove a connection#

  1. Go to Settings → Connections.
  2. Click the X icon on the connection’s row.
  3. Confirm on the Are you sure? prompt.

The connection disappears from the list and stops fetching. The holdings and activities it already brought in stay in the portfolio — removing a connection turns the feed off, it doesn’t erase your history — so those accounts simply stop updating on their own and can be kept up to date by importing or adding data by hand instead.

To reconnect afterwards, link the institution again from Add Integration.

Backward Adding Your Data Importing data Forward
Trac Docs - © 2026 by TKO Productions, LLC