If you’re using Commonwealth Bank’s (CBA) open banking to connect your accounts in TaxTank, you might have noticed complications when linking both personal and sole trader business accounts under the same login. Unfortunately, CBA has not taken steps to resolve this issue, leaving customers without a seamless way to access their own financial data. Here’s why this is happening and what we are doing about it.
What the current issue is
CBA follows the Consumer Data Right (CDR) rules, which allow individuals to share data for both personal and business accounts. However, for sole traders using a single banking login, CBA's approach creates unnecessary barriers to accessing data.
Here’s how CBA handles this:
Sole traders operating under personal accounts: Since these accounts are technically in the individual’s name, they are treated under CDR rules for individuals. This means there’s no ability to set up a “nominated representative” to authorise data sharing as other entities have.
Profile selection step: If your CBA banking ID gives you access to multiple customer profiles (such as both personal and business accounts), CBA forces you to choose a profile before selecting the accounts to share. This restriction makes it impossible to connect both profiles simultaneously.
Basiq limitations: TaxTank’s open banking provider, Basiq, does not currently allow multiple open banking connections to the same bank under one user ID. As a result, you can’t link both personal and sole trader business profiles at the same time, even though CBA could enable this functionality.
What this means for you
If you’re experiencing trouble syncing both your personal and sole trader business CBA accounts in TaxTank, it’s because of this forced profile selection step and the way Basiq handles connections.
We now have a solution that allows you to connect all of your accounts, no matter how many profiles you have.
This lets you connect more than one login for the same bank, for example separate personal, sole trader, trust, or company IDs.
How to add an additional bank profile
Go to Banks in your TaxTank dashboard
Locate the existing bank tile
Select the three dots (⋮) on the bank tile
Choose Connect additional profile
Follow the prompts and log in using your bank User ID. If this User ID has multiple profiles, you can log in multiple times and select a different profile each time to connect them separately.
Confirm the connection
Once it’s connected, you’ll see another tile for the same bank. Each tile represents a different login, so you can manage the accounts linked to each profile separately.