How bank sync works
Effective 27 September 2026
ClearHold helps New Zealand residential landlords prepare their tax properly. It turns messy receipts, bank statements and property records into structured, accountant-ready workpapers with the evidence needed to support the result.
Bank sync is part of that. It saves you hours of manual data entry at tax time. This page explains exactly how it works, what data flows where, and how to control it.
1. What the connection is for
When you connect your bank, ClearHold fetches your transaction history (descriptions, amounts, dates, counterparties) so we can categorise them into rental income and expense lines for you. You review each one; nothing is filed automatically.
2. Who moves the data: Akahu
3. What we ask for, and for how long
- Scope: read-only access to the accounts you select, under Akahu's enduring consent. We cannot move money, initiate payments, or change anything at your bank.
- Duration: ongoing, until you revoke it. We fetch recent transactions on a daily schedule so your tax summary stays current.
- First sync: up to 90 days of history to seed your categorisation rules.
- What we store: for each transaction we fetch, the date, amount, description, transaction type, Akahu's category name, the merchant name, the reference, particulars and code from your bank, and Akahu's IDs for the transaction and the account. We don't keep the other party's bank account number, card number digits, or anything else Akahu sends that ClearHold does not use. If your bank includes one of those numbers in the description or reference, it stays part of that text. We also store an access token so we can sync again next time. The token is encrypted at rest and never sent to your browser.
4. How to see or revoke access
- View every connected account on your Bank Connections page. This page is available even if your ClearHold subscription has lapsed.
- Click Disconnect to end a connection. We call Akahu to revoke our access and stop syncing straight away.
- Accounts you linked in the same bank sign-in end together. Akahu grant access per authorisation rather than per account, so they cannot release one account from a sign-in that covered several. Before you confirm, we tell you exactly which accounts will end.
- If you delete your ClearHold account, we revoke our Akahu access on the way out, before anything else is deleted.
- If your bank ends the connection on their side (for example, consent expiry or password change), we mark the connection inactive and prompt you to reconnect. No silent failures.
Your tax ledger stays. Disconnecting a bank does not touch your income and expense entries or your categorisations, and neither does deleting the separate bank-feed copy. They remain available to you for as long as your account is open. Deleting your account is a different thing, and the privacy policy section 9 explains what happens to your ledger then.
Bank-feed deletion. We delete the separate transaction copies received from Akahu, including their extra feed details, the cached account name and any remaining access token on the ended connection after a 30-day grace period. We keep a minimal connection record to prevent duplicate imports and record the disconnection. We email you around day 25; a delayed warning delays deletion. If we cannot confirm the email reached you, we also show a notice on your Bank Connections page, and we delete the bank-feed copy within 90 days of access ending regardless. Reconnecting before deletion cancels it. Other connected banks are unaffected. See sections 1B and 9 of our Privacy Policy for details.
5. Privacy
ClearHold is a NZ operation subject to the Privacy Act 2020. We only use your bank data to provide the categorisation and tax-prep features of this tool. We don't sell or share it with advertisers. Full detail in our Privacy Policy and Privacy Impact Assessment.
6. Questions
Email hello@clearhold.nz. We reply within a working day during launch.