Week of August 3, 2026

Bank sign-in, real statement periods, and agent drill-down

Banks that make you sign in on their own site can now be linked, an account can close its statement on any day of the month rather than at month end, and a connected agent can show you the transactions behind any line of a summary.

Link banks that make you sign in on their own site

Most large US banks now require you to authenticate on the bank's own site and approve Ember there, rather than typing your credentials into a window inside Ember. Ember never made that handoff, which meant Chase, Capital One, and a growing list of institutions could not be linked at all.

Adding a bank now sends you to your bank's sign-in page and brings you back where you left off, at picking which accounts to import. Re-linking a bank that needs attention takes the same path, so a connection that expires can be repaired the same way it was made. Landing back at Ember with nothing in progress tells you the session expired instead of spinning.

Your password goes to your bank. This changes where you type it, not who carries the connection afterwards: your bank still issues its approval to Plaid, which passes it to Ember.

Reconcile against the statement your bank actually printed

Ember checked every account against a calendar month. Plenty of accounts do not close on the last day of the month, so if your card closes on the 25th you were reconciling against a window your bank never printed.

An account can now record the day its statement closes, and the reconcile view cuts its periods on that day. A period is still named for the month it closes in, so 26 May to 25 June is June 2026, and the exact window shows beside the month name and in the month picker's tooltips. Accounts you leave alone keep closing at month end, so nothing moves until you set a day. When every account at one institution closes on the same day, you can apply it to all of them in one go.

Statements you have already locked stay locked, against the exact window they were locked on. Changing an account's close day does not re-cut history.

Ask a connected agent for the transactions behind a total

If you have connected an agent to Ember, it could already summarize a period by category and payee, but it had no way to show you the entries behind any line in that summary. It can now list the transactions for a category or a payee by name, which is exactly what the summary hands it.

So "what did I spend most on, and on what exactly" is two narrow questions instead of one broad one. The old route was to pull a large slice of the ledger and add it up, which on a busy year quietly ran out of room part way through and gave an answer that looked complete and was not.

Quality of life improvements

• Performance: A file import finishes in a fraction of the time it used to, and no longer holds up the rest of the app while it runs. Approving rows in the review queue keeps up with the keyboard: holding a down a queue, the review mark used to clear up to four tenths of a second after the keypress and rows could settle out of order, and it now clears on the keystroke.
• Transactions: Merging two duplicate transfers no longer leaves a stray transfer behind, pointing at the very account you are looking at.
• Transactions: A row that needs approving asks once, with one glyph. A row that was both unapproved and carrying an unconfirmed match used to stack two badges and stand at double the height of its neighbors.
• Transactions: Scheduled transactions stay out of the groups under the ledger that show what your filters hid, so next month's rent on an account you were not looking at stops turning up among money that has actually moved.
• Transactions: Ember picks up transfer rules from the conversions already in your ledger. A payment you have been turning into a transfer by hand every month is recognized now, rather than only from the next time you do it.
• Search: bank: searches the Raw bank text shown in the entry drawer, which is the line your bank actually sent. It searched a tidied version of it before, so a Venmo note, or a description a payee rule had rewritten, could not be found by the text on your screen.
• Import: More bank exports are recognized on sight, because the column names each bank uses are matched by name rather than guessed at.
• Import: An import is renamed on the name itself, with no separate pencil to aim at.
• Reconciliation: The reconcile cell turns green only when the balances genuinely tie, and an account you keep by hand can carry on reconciling instead of freezing at its own last lock.
• Reconciliation: The month grid outlines the month you have open, and its status dots are large enough to read at a glance. Editing a statement balance has an explicit save and cancel. On an account with no bank balance, the button reads Reconcile rather than naming a zero figure.
• Connections: A property-value check that cannot reach Ember says so in the check log, instead of leaving it empty as though nothing had been tried. The "Sign in to Amazon" prompt in the header clears as soon as signing in fixes it.
• Plans: Sidebar items your plan does not include read as locked, and name the plan that includes them, rather than sitting there as options that happen to be switched off.
• Security: Additional hardening from our ongoing internal review. We look at this continuously, not only when something prompts it. The public security page sets out how Ember protects your data and how to report a problem.