Troubleshooting

Most of the time Basis Budget just works. When it doesn't, here's what to check first. If nothing here solves it, email support@basisbudget.com. Real humans, usually a same-day response.

A bank won't sync

If a specific bank has stopped pulling new transactions, check Settings › Manage Banks. A stale bank shows a yellow warning triangle. Tap in and hit Reconnect. That re-auths with Plaid. Usually fixes it in under a minute.

If Reconnect fails repeatedly, it's usually on Plaid's side (that bank's integration is temporarily broken). Give it an hour, try again. The Your accounts chapter has the full walkthrough, including Apple Wallet staleness (which is different, caused by Finance authorization being revoked in iOS Settings).

Sync runs but nothing updates

On the Dashboard, tap Check Now to force a manual sync. If the spinner runs and nothing new arrives, two likely causes:

• Your bank genuinely has no new transactions (common on weekends or right after a fresh link).
• Transactions are still pending at your bank. Pending transactions may take a day or two to post and flow through Plaid. This is normal.

A transaction is missing

If you can see a transaction on your bank's website but not in Basis Budget, run through this order:

1. Is it pending? Some banks report pending charges days late to Plaid. Wait a day and check again.
2. Force a sync. Dashboard › Check Now. This triggers an immediate refresh.
3. Check filters. In the Transactions tab, make sure you don't have a filter active (account, category, search query) that would hide it.
4. Check the right account. If you have multiple accounts at the same bank, the transaction might have posted to a different one than you expected.

If it's still missing after a day of that, email support with the bank name, the approximate date, and amount.

Duplicate transactions after re-linking

If you disconnected a bank (or it got purged after a lapse) and later re-linked it, you might see duplicates: the transactions from the old connection, plus fresh ones from the new link covering some of the same dates.

This happens because the new Plaid connection is a brand-new item, so it backfills history starting from scratch and doesn't know which transactions you already had. The old records stick around because they're your data.

Cleanup is annoying right now. Bank-imported transactions can't be deleted individually (Edit mode only does bulk recategorize, not bulk delete) — they would just re-import on next sync. So you have a few options, none of them great:

• Email support. Send us the specifics (bank name, date range of the duplicates) and we can help sort it out.
• Reset & Restart (nuclear). Settings › Reset & Restart wipes all your budget data and transactions, keeps your bank connections, and walks you back through onboarding. Fresh Plaid sync will backfill clean. You lose historical budgeting data along with the duplicates.
• Hide the affected account. Doesn't actually remove the duplicates, but excludes them from totals and reports. Fine if you just want them out of sight.

A transaction is in the wrong category

Tap the transaction, pick the right category. That's the fix most of the time, and the app remembers your choice: the next transaction from that same payee will auto-apply the corrected category.

If the app keeps stubbornly guessing the wrong category for a particular payee (maybe it learned the wrong one early and now won't let go), try uncategorizing the transaction and letting auto-categorization run again. You'll usually get a better guess on the second pass.

Something got categorized as Transfer when it shouldn't be

The app auto-detects transfers between your own accounts (matching amounts, close timing). Occasionally it pairs two unrelated transactions, especially if you happened to spend the same amount at two different places on the same day.

To fix: open the transaction, change the category away from Transfer. The pairing breaks and both transactions go back to being regular spending/income.

Restoring on a new iPhone

Basis Budget syncs an encrypted backup of your data to our servers, so moving to a new iPhone is usually straightforward. Sign in with the same Apple ID you used before, and your budget comes back.

I signed in but nothing shows up

Most likely: you're signed in with a different Apple ID than the one you originally set up the app with. Tap Sign Out from Settings, then sign in again with the Apple ID that owns your budget.

Apple IDs aren't always obvious. If you're not sure which one, check iOS Settings › Apple ID at the top, and pick the one you recognize from when you originally used the app.

My accounts are there but Apple Wallet shows stale

FinanceKit authorization (for Apple Card and Apple Savings) is per-device. When you set up a new phone, that permission doesn't travel with your Apple ID. You'll need to grant it on the new device.

Go to Settings › Manage Banks › Apple Wallet › Open Settings, and toggle Basis Budget back on under Finance permissions. Next sync, your balances will update.

My Plaid-linked accounts show but balances look stale

On a new device, the first sync can take a few seconds to pull fresh balances. If they're still off after a minute or two, tap Check Now on the Dashboard to force an immediate refresh.

Subscription issues

I paid but I'm still seeing the paywall

Go to Settings and tap Restore Purchases. This asks the App Store to re-check your subscription status. Takes a few seconds, usually resolves it.

If Restore Purchases doesn't find an active subscription and you're sure you paid, the most common cause is you're signed into Basis Budget with a different Apple ID than the one that has the subscription. Check iOS Settings › Apple ID › Subscriptions and see which Apple ID owns the Basis Budget subscription.

I canceled but I'm still seeing charges

Apple charges for the full billing period even after you cancel. If you cancel mid-month, you'll still get charged for that period, and you keep access until the end of it. After that, no further charges.

If you're seeing charges past the end of your billing period, check iOS Settings › Apple ID › Subscriptions and make sure the cancellation actually took. Sometimes a tap doesn't register. If the subscription still shows as active, cancel it again from there.

For refund questions, Apple handles those through reportaproblem.apple.com. We can't issue refunds directly (Apple owns the billing), but we can help you figure out what happened.

Sharing diagnostics with support

For the thornier stuff (a transaction that won't categorize, a balance that doesn't match, Left to Assign drifting in a way that doesn't self-correct), we can figure it out faster if you send along a diagnostic. Two live in Settings, both shareable with a tap.

Audit Log

Settings › Audit Log. A running record of meaningful events: sync imports, category changes from payee rules, re-anchors, manual edits, and anything else that changed your data. Tap the share icon in the top-right to export the log as a text file and attach it to an email.

Particularly useful for “this transaction looks wrong” or “my balance doesn't match” questions. The log shows what the app thinks happened and when, which usually points straight at the issue.

Drift Diagnostic

Settings › Drift Diagnostic (Zero-Based mode only). The full breakdown of why your bank balance and your transaction sum might disagree. Shows the exact dollar difference, how much is explained by pending transactions or pay-over-time credit card earmarks, and how much is genuinely unexplained.

The diagnostic has a share button at the bottom. If your Left to Assign math feels off, sending this saves a lot of back-and-forth.

For more on what drift is and how it usually resolves on its own, see the Zero-Based budgeting chapter.

Nothing here worked

From the app, Settings › Contact Support opens a pre-addressed email to support@basisbudget.com. Include as much detail as you can: what you were trying to do, what the app actually did, and which bank or feature it's about. Screenshots help a lot. So does the exact error message if you got one, or an audit-log / drift diagnostic export (see above).

Responses usually come the same day. It goes straight to the founder, not a generic queue.

Prefer a faster back-and-forth, or want to chat with other users? The Basis Budget Discord works for support too. Post a question in the help channel and we'll usually pick it up within a day. It's also the best place for “hey does anyone else do it this way” questions and general chat about budgeting.

For account-specific issues (billing, subscription, anything with your personal data), email is still better because we can go into detail without posting privately in a public server.