You open your budget on a Sunday and something’s off. Groceries look light. Dining looks suspiciously virtuous. Twenty minutes later you figure it out: the bank connection died three weeks ago, nobody told you, and every purchase since then is missing. Now you get to reconstruct it by hand.
Silent breaks like that don’t get talked about enough in budgeting apps. Connections break. An OAuth token expires, a bank changes its API, an email scanner hits a rate limit. And from the outside nothing looks wrong. The app opens, the dashboard loads, the charts are pretty. Behind them, the pipe feeding your transactions has quietly stopped.
We got tired of that, so we built disconnect alerts. If your Gmail, Google Sheets, or SimpleFin integration errors out or drops, you hear about it right away, before the missing transactions have a chance to stack up.
Why integrations disconnect
A quick tour of what goes wrong, so an alert reads as “ah, that again” rather than a small panic.
Gmail integration disconnects
Our Gmail integration signs in with OAuth and scans your inbox for transaction emails from merchants and banks. Those OAuth tokens expire eventually. Google asks you to re-approve apps every so often, and it’s more likely to ask if you’ve changed your Google password, touched your security settings, or left the integration idle for a long stretch.
It can also break if Google’s sign-in servers have a bad day, if you remove Skwad’s access in your Google account settings, or if the scan runs into a permissions error. Setting it up for the first time? See how to forward transactions from Gmail to Skwad.
Google Sheets integration disconnects
If you like building your own reports, the Sheets integration pipes your Skwad transactions into a spreadsheet. It’s OAuth under the hood as well, so it expires and needs re-approval on the same terms as Gmail. Sheets has one extra way to fail: the spreadsheet itself. Delete it, move it, or tweak its sharing and the link snaps.
SimpleFin disconnects
SimpleFin is an open banking protocol that lets Skwad sync your bank transactions directly. It can drop when your institution’s SimpleFin token expires, when the institution changes how it authenticates, or when SimpleFin itself has an outage.
This is the one you most want to catch fast. For people who use SimpleFin, it’s usually where most of their transactions come from. Miss a day of sync and that’s a day of spending gone from your budget, and filling those holes after the fact is a pain.
How Skwad integration alerts work
The moment a sync fails or a connection drops, a Skwad notification goes out. It’s short, and it tells you three things:
- Which integration broke: Gmail, Google Sheets, or SimpleFin
- What went wrong, in a line
- Where to fix it, with a link straight to the settings page where you reauthorize or reconnect
So you don’t spelunk through menus. Tap, fix, done.
SimpleFin alert deduplication
SimpleFin connects per institution. So with several accounts linked at one bank, one failure could in theory fire off an alert for each of them. We don’t let that happen. Alerts are grouped by institution, and if three accounts at the same bank all fail over one expired token, you get one alert.
One bank, one ping. It names the bank, too, so you’re not left guessing.
The cost of missing the alert
Picture the week without alerts.
SimpleFin syncs your chequing account. On Wednesday the connection breaks. You’re busy, Skwad still opens fine, so you don’t notice. By Saturday you’re four days short. By the following Thursday, eight. Then you sit down to check the budget and it’s weird: categories look underspent, and the total doesn’t match what you know you’ve been spending.
It may not even occur to you that the connection is the problem. Maybe the categories are wrong? You pull up bank statements. You wonder whether Skwad filed something in the wrong place. Eventually it clicks that the integration died, and the options are to type in a week of transactions yourself, or reconnect and sit through the historical sync.
With alerts, none of that plays out. Wednesday, the break happens and your phone buzzes. Thursday morning, you reauthorize. Thursday afternoon, you’re caught up. A few hours of gap, a few minutes of effort.
Reconnecting after an alert
Every fix starts in the same spot: Settings > Integrations. The alert link drops you there directly. After that, each integration has its own quirks.
Reconnecting Gmail
- Open Skwad and go to Settings > Integrations
- Find the Gmail integration and tap Reconnect or Reauthorize
- Finish the Google sign-in in your browser
- Grant Skwad the permissions it asks for
- Skwad resumes scanning your inbox right away
We pick up from where the scan stopped, so transaction emails that hit your inbox during the outage get processed as the scan reaches them.
Reconnecting Google Sheets
- Go to Settings > Integrations
- Find the Google Sheets integration
- Tap Reconnect and finish the sign-in
- Check that the linked spreadsheet is still accessible
If somebody deleted or moved the sheet, that’s probably why it broke in the first place, and you’ll want to link a different one from the integration settings.
Reconnecting SimpleFin
- Go to Settings > Integrations
- Find the affected SimpleFin institution
- Tap Reconnect and follow the steps for that institution
- SimpleFin re-establishes the connection and syncing picks back up
A few institutions make you generate a fresh SimpleFin access token inside their own settings first. The alert and the reconnect flow in Skwad walk you through it when that’s needed.
Who should care most about disconnect alerts
Weekly check-in type? Then this is really for you. A break on Monday that nobody flags can mean five to seven days of missing spending by the time you sit down with your coffee. The alert reaches you right away, so the gap stays small whether or not you’d have spotted it.
SimpleFin users get the most out of them. Since SimpleFin tends to be the main source of transactions, a break nobody mentions can wreck weeks of tracking. With alerts, SimpleFin is a lot more dependable day to day.
Running a bigger setup, say Gmail scanning plus SimpleFin plus a Sheets export? More moving parts means more places to break, and alerts cover every one of them. And if you’re watching cash flow closely or saving toward a specific goal, even a day or two of missing transactions can throw the numbers off.
Integration best practices
A few habits cut down how often this happens at all. When you’re cleaning up the connected apps in your Google account, leave Skwad’s access alone unless you actually want to disconnect. Some SimpleFin institutions let you choose how long tokens last, so if yours keeps dropping, check for a longer-lived option. Rely on Gmail scanning? Pop into the integration settings once a month and make sure it still says connected. And when an alert does arrive, don’t sit on it. A same-day reconnect usually catches up with barely any cleanup.
Frequently asked questions
Which integrations does Skwad monitor for disconnects?
Gmail, Google Sheets, and SimpleFin. If any of them errors out or drops, you get a notification saying what happened, with a link to reconnect.
Will I get a flood of alerts if several accounts at one bank fail?
No. We group SimpleFin alerts by institution, so three accounts at one bank failing over one expired token gets you a single alert, not three. It names the bank, so you know where to look.
Do I lose transactions while an integration is disconnected?
Nothing you already have is touched. Once you reconnect, Skwad starts syncing again and backfills whatever happened while it was down. The quicker you act on the alert, the smaller that gap, and the less tidying up afterward.
An app you can trust is tracking your spending
Garbage in, garbage budget. If a week of spending never arrived, every number on the screen is quietly lying to you, and we’d rather you never have to wonder. That’s the job of these alerts. Gmail, Sheets, SimpleFin: when one of them hiccups, you’ll hear about it while the hole is still tiny.
Want to see how yours are holding up right now? It’s all under Settings > Integrations. The integrations documentation goes deeper on how each one works, and Skwad Scan email addresses are another way to keep transactions coming in.
