How to deal with a closed bank account in PocketSmith
When you close an account with your bank, PocketSmith's bank feed connection will still attempt to connect to the account, which can result in a connection error. It's best to unlink the feed from the account and zero any remaining balance.
Unlinking the account from the bank feed means that the account and its transaction history will remain, but it will be converted to an offline account
Zero the remaining balance. When your account was closed, it is likely that a final transaction was made to balance the account to $0. However, if this transaction happened as the account was being closed at your bank, it won't have been imported into PocketSmith. Therefore a matching transaction will need to be added in PocketSmith to zero the balance here, too.
Unlinking an account from a bank feed
- Head to the Feeds page (Manage > Feeds)
- Find and click on the feed in the sidebar
- Click the Accounts tab
- Click Unlink on the account
Note
If the closed account is the only account associated with that particular bank feed, then it's best to remove the bank feed entirely.
You can learn how to do this here: Remove a bank feed
Zeroing the balance of your closed account
- Head to the Account Summary page (Manage > Account Summary)
- Navigate to your recently closed account and click MANAGE ACCOUNT
- Under Transactions, select Manual input
- Fill in the transaction details, ensuring that the Amount is equal to the remaining balance showing in PocketSmith
- If the remaining balance is positive then select the Expense type
- If the remaining balance is negative then select the Income type
- You can assign this to a transfer category and tick to mark this as a transfer at this point
- Then click SAVE ALL TRANSACTIONS
- Check your account balance and it will now be zero
Note
If you have a grouped account, you will need to follow the instructions in this guide: Adding manual transactions to an account within a group.
Hiding an account from the Net Worth page
For steps on hiding an account from the Net Worth (Reports > Net Worth) page, please see: Hiding an account from the Net Worth page.
Archiving closed accounts
If you have a number of closed accounts, you may wish to create an archive group. To learn more please see: Archiving and keeping transactions for old accounts
Managing budgets for closed accounts
If you’ve closed an account that had budgets assigned to it, those budgets will remain assigned to the closed account in PocketSmith, impacting that account’s forecast after its ‘closed’ date. There are a few options for managing these budgets, depending on whether you’d like to keep them active.
Options for keeping the budgets active
If you’d like to move the budgets from your closed account to a new account, you can:
- Edit each budget individually to be assigned to a new account from a specific date forward
- Or, move the scenario containing the budgets to a new account’s forecast (including past budgets)
Options for ending the budgets
If you don’t wish to keep the budgets from your now closed account active, you can:
- Add end dates to each budget
- Or you can ‘park’ the scenario containing the account’s budgets, so that they are no longer assigned to any account. Alternative - create a new primary scenario, and delete the scenario containing the old budgets?
Assign each budget to a new account from a specific date
If you’d like to assign each budget to a new account from a specific date, follow the steps below:
- Head to the Calendar, and isolate the closed account
- Navigate to the date you want the budget to switch over to the new account, then click the budget event. This will open the budget edit form.
- Under ‘Which account’s forecast is this budget for?’, select the new account you want to assign the budget to. Then, click SAVE
- When confirming changes, select the option This and future budget events, then click CONFIRM CHANGES
- Repeat these step for all budgets you’d like to change over
Move scenario to a new account
Each account in PocketSmith has an account and a primary scenario. The ‘account’ holds the balance and transaction information, while the ‘scenario’ holds all of the budgets to generate a forecast for the account. As such, you can move the scenario to assign all budgets associated with the closed account to a new account.
Alert
This option moves all budgets associated with the closed account, including past events, to the new account. This means the budgets will affect the new account’s forecast from their start date, which may result in an inaccurate past forecast, as it may predate the start date of the account. If desired, you can reset the forecast on past dates so that it matches the actual balance of the account.
Step one: Create a new primary scenario for the closed account First, create a new primary scenario for the old account, as it’s not possible to move a primary scenario to another account
- Head to Organize Accounts & Scenarios (Manage > Organize Accounts & Scenarios).
- Hover over Manage on the closed account and select Add scenario.
- Enter a 'dummy' name, such as 'Placeholder'. Then, click Save settings.
- Hover over manage, for this same account and select edit.
- Using the drop-down, change the primary scenario to the ‘Placeholder’ scenario you just created, and hit SAVE This will mean the original scenario (that contains all your budgets) is no longer 'locked' to your old account as the Primary Scenario.
Step two: Move the scenario from the closed account to the new account
Drag and drop the scenario containing the budgets from the closed accounts to the new account.
Step three: Tidying up (optional)
If the new account did not yet have budgets assigned to it’s original primary scenario, you may like to tidy up and remove it from the account. This helps to avoid confusion between scenarios when managing the account on the calendar, or when assigning new budgets to the account.
- Change the scenario containing the budgets to the primary scenario for the new account
- Delete the original ‘primary’ scenario for your new account
Adding end dates to each budget
If you don’t want to keep using the budgets from your closed account, you can add end dates to each budget for your closed account.
- Head to the Calendar, and isolate the closed account in the account selection panel.
- Click on a budget event to open the budget edit form
- Enter an end date for the budget, and click UPDATE
- When confirming how you'd like the changes to apply, select 'All budget events in this series', then click CONFIRM CHANGES
- Repeat this step for each budget you’d like to end.
Note
The end date will not be included in the budget's repeating period.
So, if you want a repeating budget to have its last budget on a particular day, select an end date after the last budget event's date and before the next budget event.
Example: I have a transfer budget for my loan repayment that repeats monthly on the 1st of each month. I want this to end on 1 December 2026, as it will be paid off.
So I select an end date of 2 December 2026 to include the last budget event on 1 December 2026.