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New Account Process

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Nick Sergeant edited this page Aug 19, 2017 · 5 revisions

This document details the ideas I've had for how a new account could be created.

When a user creates a new Account after creating a Leather login, I've been imagining three paths for creating that account:

  1. Manual account
  2. Plaid-linked account with full transaction history
  3. Plaid-linked account with only future imported transactions

For (1) manual account, the user simply gives the account a name, starting_balance, and type (checking, savings, etc -- though we should keep these the same as account types from Plaid).

For (2 and 3) Plaid-linked account with full/future-only transaction history, the user bypasses the name, starting_balance, and type fields and clicks "Link with bank account" (or similar). Here's an example of what I had for leather-django:

Account Creation

When the user clicks "Link your bank account", they are go into the Plaid Link UI, where they complete the process. Once they've successfully connected, we get a token and reload the page, and at this point we need a UI for the user to make some selections. They need to choose which accounts from the Plaid.Account they want to create-or-link Accounts for in Leather, and whether they want those accounts to be started "fresh" with no transaction data (only future imported transactions) or if they want a historical pull of transactions. I say "create-or-link" because I think if you connect to your bank account with Plaid and you've already created a manual Account, you should be able to say "link this Plaid-connected checking account with this already-existing Account".

For (3) where the user only wants future imported transactions, they'll also need to set a starting balance.

Separate from the new-account-setup, I'm imagining a "Linked Accounts" settings UI where users could link/unlink Plaid.Accounts to Accounts at any time, since the only actual "linkage" should be handling a webhook of imported transactions and turning them into Transactions for the linked Account.

Note: from a data perspective, I believe we also want a Plaid.PlaidAccount model, which stores the user's access_token and public_token, but maybe the new API changes that. For posterity, here's how I implemented that in leather-django: https://github.com/nicksergeant/leather-django/blob/master/leather/accounts/models.py#L8

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