Is it safe to give a bookkeeping app your bank login?

No, and you don't have to.

Anything that collects your bookkeeping documents for you has to reach the places they live — your bank, your suppliers' billing portals, your email. Handing over the login itself is one way to arrange that, and it is the way most tools in this category work, because they run on somebody else's servers and the access has to be there too.

It is not the only way. If the work happens on your own machine, you can sign in yourself, in your own browser, and let the software drive the window you are already signed into. Nobody is given a password, because nobody needs one.

What a cloud service needs from you

Most tools in this category run as a web service. For one of those to read your invoices, it needs standing access to the place they arrive: a connection to your mailbox, or the login for each supplier portal, held on their side so their servers can use it while you are asleep.

That is not a criticism of how any of them is built — it is what the shape requires. If the work happens on their machines, the access has to be on their machines too. It does mean the answer to "who can reach my accounts" includes a company, its staff, its subprocessors and whatever happens to it later.

What Clerk.AI does instead

It runs on your Mac and drives a real browser there — its own Chrome window on a separate profile kept just for this, not your everyday browsing. You sign into your banks and portals in that window once, yourself, and those sessions stay put on your machine. The commitments, in the words they are made in on how it works:

“We never ask for a banking password. Logins happen in your browser, by you.”
“There is no Clerk.AI cloud holding your books.”
“Reading receipts and transcribing your voice happen on the Mac.”
“It stays inside your books folder and Downloads. It won't go browsing your Desktop or iCloud Drive.”
“iPhone sync, if you use it, goes through your own iCloud.”

There is no account of yours on a server of ours holding any of it, because there is no server. That is the structural part: we could not read your bank session if we wanted to, since it never leaves the machine it was created on.

What does leave your Mac

Something has to reason about the documents, and that step goes to a model. Again in the words used on how it works: “The agent step that reasons about your books does go to a model. Which one, and under whose agreement, is your choice.” Today that is your own subscription, under your own contract with the provider, which is the arrangement you already have if you use one.

So “it all stays on your Mac” would be the wrong thing for us to say, and we do not say it. Your books are stored on your machine and your logins never leave it; the reasoning step is a network call, the same as any other use of an assistant.

Signing into things is still the hard part

Worth saying plainly, because the industry has been here before. Xero used to log into supplier portals and download documents on its customers' behalf, and it retired that in 2022, saying the connections had become outdated and were “often blocked by banks and online suppliers”. Banks and suppliers block automation deliberately, and they are not going to stop.

Driving a real browser that reads the page, rather than a script that expects a fixed one, copes with a great deal more of that. It does not make the problem disappear. What it does is fail in the open: when a login needs you, it leaves the tab there and asks, rather than recording a silent blank you find out about at the year end.

The longer version of this question, including where it is genuinely up to you, is on how it works under “is it safe to let this near your bank?”.

Your logins, on your machine

Have a look at what it actually does.

Runs on your Mac. Pay what you decide, including nothing.

Apple Silicon or Intel · macOS 14+ · v0.4.1