03hchen
commented
10 months ago Rough Idea: use Plaid to connect to Heart of Passion bank account and populate admin screen with deposits that can be manually sorted on the website
Making a Plaid account
- Can make a free account at https://plaid.com/ and obtain API credentials
- Access developer keys: https://dashboard.plaid.com/developers/keys
- Plaid project and .env example: https://github.com/plaid/quickstart/blob/master/.env.example
How Plaid works
- Link: drop-in module that provides secure authentication, allows users to connect bank accounts to Plaid
- https://plaid.com/docs/api/tokens/
link_tokenis supplied to Plaid Link to initialize it and receive apublic token- exchange
public_tokenforaccess_tokenanditem_id(the bank account) - store
access_tokensecurely on server, allows access to user financial data without having to log in again
Important Plaid Endpoints
/link/token/create: creates a Link token to initialize Plaid Link component and provide consent to bank accounts- https://plaid.com/docs/api/tokens/#linktokencreate
- other useful token creation endpoints here too
/item/public_token/exchange: exchange public Link token for API access token/item/get: retrieve information about a user's linked bank account/transactions/sync: retrieve user's transaction data- https://plaid.com/docs/api/products/transactions/#transactionssync
- use over
/transactions/getsince it can track transaction updates (only return new transactions)
/categories/get: default Plaid categories- https://plaid.com/docs/api/products/transactions/#categoriesget
- might be useful for categorizing transactions? might also just use custom categories
Some resources for linking Plaid and React
Description
As we are wrapping up this sprint, we want to do a little ground work to prepare for next semester. In particular, we need a way to automatically compile online donation information and allow a user to manually input donation information.
As of now, we are unsure about how much work it will involve to automatically retrieve donation information for the nonprofit / individual chapters, and need to plan ahead for next semester. This ticket involves researching about what a possible design might look like, and come up with some concrete steps for its implementation (some tickets that aren't fully fleshed out).
Problem
Right now, Heart of Passion has one bank account they use for managing donations for all the chapters. People can donate via a check, PayPal (I think this is through the form of there website), or alternatives like venmo / the admins of Heart of Passion can manually add some money from other sources. We want to make it easy for them to categorize the different donations, so that chapters can keep track of their funds, and also keep track of the donors so that they can send thank you notes / follow ups. They're interested in automating much of the process and they will give us access to the bank account and/or the bank statements. They are open to changing other parts of their process, like the form on their web if we need to integrate anything there. We would like to see if there is an easy way to automate pulling deposits into the bank account and categorizing them by chapter/type/donor/whatever possible. A tentative idea right now is to connect to their bank account via some API (Plaid?), and automatically populate an admin screen in the website with each deposit. From there, a Heart of Passion admin can go in and categorize each deposit, assigning them to a specific chapter, and modifying any necessary information. For this ticket, we want to see if the above idea is possible, what tools we might need to use in order to achieve it (i.e Paypal API, Plaid API, etc), and figure out a VERY ROUGH action plan of the steps needed for developers.
Links
Heart of Passion Donation Site: https://fs19.formsite.com/HeartofPassion/Donate/index.html Plaid: https://plaid.com/ (
Notes