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Why link your bank to Decarbon?

In a word, convenience.

Decarbon offers you a means to conveniently understand how you are impacting climate change based on your purchases. By linking your bank with Decarbon, the purchases you make will automatically import into the app for carbon impact estimation. Once linked, we believe this is substantially easier and more insightful than most carbon footprint calculators that are 20-step forms that only take a one-time snapshot of your impact.

How to link your bank

Introducing Plaid

Decarbon uses Plaid, a financial technology company, to securely link with your bank. Plaid is the trusted linking tool for major financial institutions like American Express, Venmo, SoFi, and many others. Plaid uses encryption protocols like the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES 256) and Transport Layer Security (TLS). Learn more about how Plaid works from Plaid themselves here.

Plaid’s linking tool to connect your spending with Decarbon

What data can Decarbon access?

By using Plaid, Decarbon only has view-only access to your credit and debit card purchase information. Decarbon doesn't have access to your bank logins, account numbers, or any other sensitive information.

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While you can delete your bank links anytime from within Decarbon, Plaid also has a Portal where you can see and manage the bank connections you've made with Plaid across all of your apps.

Linking in the app

After you 🙋Sign up for Decarbon, you'll see the welcome screen with a button to link your bank.

After following Plaid's instructions and successfully linking, it takes a few minutes for the purchases to start appearing in the app within the Impact tab. Once the purchases have appeared, you're all set. New purchases should appear about 15 minutes after purchases are made, but it can vary depending on your bank.

If you have multiple credit cards with different banks, you can link with additional banks by navigating to main menu > Banks > Add Bank.

If you can’t find your bank or have trouble linking, please reach out to us at hi@decarbonapp.com.

Deleting a bank link

You can delete your bank links anytime in the app by going to the main menu > Banks > tap the bank you want to delete > tap the red trash can > confirming the delete.

Deleting the bank link will delete all of the associated purchases stored in Decarbon. You can restore a bank link by following the instructions above, but it won't restore the purchases that were deleted and any modifications you've made.

Or... Use our Impact Estimator

We recognize that using Plaid to link your bank might be uncomfortable for some. You can still easily track your carbon footprint with Decarbon by using our Impact Estimator.

From the Impact tab, tap the blue plus button on the bottom-right and then tap the Monthly estimate button to access the Impact Estimator.

The estimator will ask a sequence of simple questions to calculate an approximate carbon footprint for the month you specify.

Your inputs will generate estimated purchases that are added into the app so you can view your impact and budget in the same way as if you linked your bank.
Your inputs are then saved for the next time you use the estimator for a faster next go around.

Here’s a quick demo of how the Impact Estimator works:

Track single purchases

You can also add single purchases into Decarbon at any time. This is also a handy way to track purchases that you didn’t pay for (like when someone treats you to dinner).

From the Impact tab, tap the blue plus button on the bottom-right and then tap Single purchase to add a purchase manually.

Next: 🤔So what is carbon budgeting?

Home: Decarbon User Guide

Did we miss something? Not to worry! Just email us at hi@decarbonapp.com

Link your bank (or use our estimator)