Updated 2026-04-19

Connect Everything, Even the Weird Stuff

A tour of the account layer in Per Diem, from connected banking and brokerage sync to manual assets, liabilities, mortgages, and family context that rarely fit cleanly into other tools.

Quick answer

• Connected account sync is important, but a real household plan also needs manual accounts, liabilities, and family context that aggregators often miss.
• Per Diem is designed for households with mortgages, stock plans, 529s, HSAs, vehicles, and other details that do not fit neatly into a clean dashboard.
• The goal is not perfect data purity. The goal is a planning model that can hold the real shape of the household.

Real households do not fit into a neat aggregator-only model

A lot of finance software quietly assumes that if the product can sync your bank and brokerage accounts, it has captured the truth of your financial life. That works up to a point, but it falls apart fast for households with more going on than checking, savings, and a taxable brokerage account.

Real households have mortgages. They have manual assets that are still part of net worth. They have RSUs or ESPP balances, HSAs, 529 plans, private liabilities, vehicles, dependents, and future obligations that matter even if no aggregator can classify them elegantly.

Connected data is still the foundation

None of that means connected data is optional. Account sync is still the fastest path to a living financial model. It pulls in balances, transactions, and investment context without asking the household to re-enter every number by hand.

But connected data is the starting point, not the entire product promise. A planning tool should not become less useful the moment the household has something unusual.

The important part is what happens after the sync

What distinguishes a more complete planning product is the ability to keep building the household model after the linked accounts arrive.

• Manual accounts for balances you still want represented clearly.
• First-class liabilities such as mortgages and vehicle loans.
• Account types that matter for planning, like HSAs, 529s, and stock-plan balances.
• Income context that includes wage deductions and the shape of take-home pay.
• Family context, dependents, and future life events that affect the plan even though they are not “accounts.”

This matters because planning is not just net worth tracking

Net worth is useful, but a household does not make decisions from net worth alone. It makes decisions from obligations, future expenses, income structure, and the life it expects to support along the way.

A mortgage is not just a liability line. Kids are not just a note in your head. A 529 plan is not just another account bucket. These details meaningfully change how a household interprets current spending and long-term freedom.

Why manual support is a feature, not a failure

There is a common instinct in fintech to treat manual entry like an embarrassing fallback. In reality, manual support is part of respecting how messy actual finances can be.

If a product can only model the parts of your life that are easy for a data provider to sync, it is not really modeling your life. It is modeling the easiest slice of it.

Per Diem is more useful when it can take the connected accounts, the manual adjustments, and the family context and hold them in one coherent household model.

The goal is one planning system for the whole household

The best version of this product is not a prettier account dashboard. It is a planning system that can absorb the strange edges of real life without immediately pushing the household back into spreadsheets.

That is what “connect everything, even the weird stuff” really means. Not that every financial detail is effortless, but that the household finally has one place where the full picture can exist and still be useful.