Plaid Check — Consumer Report Sample App

A sample loan application demonstrating Plaid's Check Consumer Report (CRA) products:

Module	Type
Base Report	GA
Income Insights	GA
Network Insights	Beta
Cashflow Insights	Beta
LendScore	Beta
Home Lending (VOA)	Early availability

For Statements, see the regular multi-product Quickstart.

Plaid Check Consumer Report is Plaid's recommended solution for most credit use cases. For the legacy Income product, see income-sample.

Prerequisites

Access to Consumer Report in Sandbox is not granted by default. Existing Plaid customers can submit a product access request or contact their account manager. New customers can contact Sales.

The beta modules (Network Insights, Cashflow Insights, LendScore) and the Home Lending module (early availability) require separate enablement. Contact your account manager if those tabs show "not available."

Running the app

1. Copy .env.template to .env and add your Plaid credentials:

   cp .env.template .env
   

2. Install dependencies and start everything:

   npm install && npm start
   

This starts three processes concurrently:

• Main server on port 3001
• Webhook receiver on port 8002
• Vite dev server on port 5173

Open http://localhost:5173 in your browser.

Using the app

Click Apply for a Loan, then complete the form. Use Fill with test data to pre-fill the form including a test SSN and the home lending checkbox. Due to Sandbox limitations, the phone number prefilled in Link will not necessarily match the phone number entered in this form; this will not occur in Production.

When Plaid Link opens, use a non-OAuth institution (e.g. First Platypus Bank) and the Sandbox credentials below. The default user_good Sandbox user should not be used with this app as it doesn't have realistic income history.

Important: In Plaid Link, if you're going through the returning user flow, connect a new bank rather than using a saved account so that you can enter the Sandbox credentials below.

Username	Password	Description
user_bank_income	{}	Wide variety of income streams of different types
user_credit_bonus	any	Two salary streams: one with bonuses in paycheck, one with bonuses as separate transactions
user_credit_joint_account	any	Two salary streams and two identities on the account
user_credit_profile_excellent	any	Positive cash flow, high salary-based income with secondary rental income
user_credit_profile_good	any	Neutral cash flow, multiple gig economy income streams
user_credit_profile_poor	any	Net loss cash flow, no consistent income source

After connecting, the app waits for a webhook from Plaid indicating the report is ready. Without webhooks configured (see below), it polls automatically.

Once the report is ready, you'll see tabs for each product:

• Base Report — account balances and transaction history
• Income Insights — detected income sources and estimated monthly income
• Network Insights — risk signals from connection history including rent, BNPL, cash advances, and EWA (beta)
• Cashflow Insights — aggregated transaction volatility measures across income and expenditure categories (beta)
• LendScore — 1–99 default risk score with top adverse action reason codes (beta)
• Home Lending — Verification of Assets (VOA) report; only shown when the home lending checkbox was checked during application

Additional actions:

• Download PDF — full consumer report PDF
• Refresh data — triggers a report refresh for the same user without re-running Link, demonstrating the /cra/check_report/create flow. In Sandbox the refreshed report won't show new data since there's no new activity to pick up.
• Start Over — resets the app

Receiving webhooks

Plaid sends a USER_CHECK_REPORT_READY webhook when your report is generated. To receive it locally, expose port 8002 with ngrok:

ngrok http 8002

Copy the forwarding URL into your .env file:

WEBHOOK_URL=https://abc123.ngrok-free.app

The /server/receive_webhook path is appended automatically so you can paste just the base URL. Restart the server after updating .env. You can also update the webhook URL at runtime via the debug panel without restarting.

To inspect incoming webhooks, open http://localhost:4040. ngrok's inspector shows every request with full headers and body, and lets you replay them.

Without a webhook URL configured, the app polls for report status every 5 seconds as a fallback.

Debug panel

The collapsible debug panel at the bottom of the page shows:

• Status messages and any errors from report fetching
• The Plaid user_id for the current session (useful for API debugging)
• The current webhook URL with a form to update it at runtime
• A link to the ngrok inspector

Data storage

User data is stored in user_data.json (created automatically, excluded from git). The session persists across server restarts. To start fresh, click Start Over in the app or delete user_data.json.