Step 1: Connect accounts
Step 1: Add your accounts
Connect all your bank, credit card and other financial institutions, then select your payment processor and payroll service provider.
1. Connect Your Bank Accounts and Credit Cards
Intro to Accounts
During onboarding, follow the onscreen instructions to connect all your business bank accounts, credit cards, and payment processors.
By adding all of your accounts (business and personal), you’ll get a complete financial picture. That means more tax savings, reliable reports, and peace of mind.
Why do I need to connect all my accounts to Kick?
Connecting all your business accounts—checking, savings, credit cards, and payment processors—ensures that your bookkeeping is accurate and complete.
If you’re missing account transaction data, your bookkeeping and accounting will be incomplete. Incomplete data could result in inaccurate reports, which could lead to inaccurate tax filings.
Why does Kick want me to add my personal accounts?
Connecting your personal accounts helps Kick maintain accurate financials by categorizing transfers between business and personal as Contributions/Distributions.
Kick also offers a simple and easy way to move any personal transactions that are business deductions to your business financials.
→ Jump to Moving Personal Transactions to Business Expenses
What if my Accounts Don’t Connect to Plaid?
Use our Importer Tool
You can still use Kick even if your accounts don’t connect to Plaid by importing your transaction data. Our importer tool will automatically transform CSVs, PDFs, or image files into transactions.
→ Jump to How to Use Our Importer Tool
2. Connect Your Payment Processor
Intro to Payment Processors
Your bank account shows deposits from payment processors like Stripe, but those amounts don’t include merchant fees deducted before the deposit.
Connecting your payment processor to Kick ensures both revenue and merchant fees are recorded correctly for accurate financial reporting.
What if my payment processor is not listed?
If you cannot connect your payment processor through Plaid, you will still be able to see your income from these processors via deposits into your connected checking account. However you still won’t be able to see your gross revenue and merchant fees. The best way to include this data into Kick is to use our importer tool to import transaction data.
You can use our importer tool to import CSV, PDF, Excel or images from your payment processor. In most cases this will identify the merchant fees as long as they are shown on the file exports.
→ Jump to How to Use Our Importer Tool
Can’t I manually record merchant fees?
Yes, you can "split" the transactions to separate out the merchant fees. However, this requires identifying and adjusting each deposit manually, which can be time-consuming and prone to errors.
→ Jump to Splitting Transactions
3. Select your payroll service provider
Sharing your payroll provider helps Kick maintain accurate financials by categorizing payroll-related expenses (payroll, taxes, fees).
How does Kick handle payroll reconciliation?
Payroll reconciliation ensures that employee wages, tax withholdings, and payroll expenses recorded in your bookkeeping match your actual bank transactions, preventing errors, ensuring tax compliance, and keeping financial reports accurate.
Kick will reconcile payroll for Plus and Custom users annually, once the tax year has concluded.
Why Does Kick Only Do Annual Payroll Reconciliations?
Kick focuses on annual payroll reconciliation because most businesses need payroll data finalized for year-end tax reporting, like W-2s, 1099s, and payroll tax filings.
Since payroll services handle tax payments and withholdings throughout the year, reconciling annually ensures all transactions are accurate without requiring ongoing manual adjustments.
This approach keeps your books clean, minimizes errors, and simplifies tax season while reducing unnecessary bookkeeping work.
Won’t My Books Be Inaccurate Without Monthly Payroll Reconciliations?
Not entirely. Your books will still reflect accurate payroll expenses throughout the year.
Since payroll services handle tax withholdings and payments automatically, your payroll costs are recorded as transactions occur within your bank account.
The annual payroll reconciliation ensures everything is correctly categorized and matched for tax reporting, but your financial reports will still give you a clear, real-time picture of your payroll expenses throughout the year since it reflects the net amount withdrawn.
What if I want monthly payroll reconciliations?
If you prefer to have monthly payroll reconciliations, you can submit your request to Kick’s Accountant Connect program and we’ll match you with a with a trusted advisor.