Send Invoices, Pay Bills And Pull Financial Reports Automatically With QuickBooks

Most small businesses running QuickBooks have someone re-keying numbers: orders from the store into invoices, supplier bills from email into payables, totals from the books into a weekly report for the owner. If that sounds familiar, the good news is that QuickBooks can be reached through an API, a way for other software (or an AI assistant) to read and write your books directly. The re-keying becomes a connection that runs on its own.

What QuickBooks does

QuickBooks is Intuit’s accounting software for small businesses, the self-employed and accountants, available as QuickBooks Online in the cloud and QuickBooks Desktop. The QuickBooks Online Accounting API gives software access to a company’s financial data, so it can read, create, update and delete things like invoices, customers, payments, bills, vendors, items and tax data. Access is granted by the business owner through OAuth 2.0, the familiar “allow this app to connect to your account” screen.

What you can get done

Accounts Receivable Management

This is the money coming in: knowing who owes you, how late they are, and handling credits when something goes wrong.

• GET /v3/company/{realmID}/reports/AgedReceivables gives you the summary of who owes what, grouped by how overdue it is.
• GET /v3/company/{realmID}/reports/AgedReceivableDetail breaks that down line by line.
• POST /v3/company/{realmID}/creditmemo creates, updates or deletes a credit memo, the record of money you owe back to a customer.
• POST /v3/company/{realmID}/creditmemo/{creditmemoId}/send emails that credit memo to the customer.
• GET /v3/company/{realmID}/creditmemo/{creditmemoId}/pdf gets it as a PDF for your own records.

Accounts Payable Management

The money going out. Bills from suppliers can land in the books the moment they arrive, and payments can be recorded against them.

• POST /v3/company/{realmID}/bill creates, updates or deletes a bill.
• GET /v3/company/{realmID}/bill/{billId} reads one back.
• POST /v3/company/{realmID}/billpayment records, voids or updates a payment against a bill.
• GET /v3/company/{realmID}/reports/AgedPayables shows what you owe and how soon it is due.

Financial Reporting Management

The reports an owner, a lender or an investor asks for, pulled straight into a dashboard or a scheduled email instead of exported by hand.

• GET /v3/company/{realmID}/reports/ProfitAndLoss returns the profit and loss statement.
• GET /v3/company/{realmID}/reports/BalanceSheet returns the balance sheet.
• GET /v3/company/{realmID}/reports/CashFlow returns the cash flow statement.
• GET /v3/company/{realmID}/reports/CustomerSales and GET /v3/company/{realmID}/reports/ItemSales show sales by customer and by product.

Purchase Order Management

For businesses that order stock, purchase orders can be raised from your inventory system and sent without opening QuickBooks.

• POST /v3/company/{realmID}/purchaseorder creates, updates or deletes a purchase order.
• POST /v3/company/{realmID}/purchaseorder/{purchaseorderId}/send emails it to the supplier.
• GET /v3/company/{realmID}/purchaseorder/{purchaseorderId}/pdf gets it as a PDF.

Indirect Tax Management

Sales tax setup is a quiet source of errors. The API lets software read the tax rates and codes in use and set up new ones.

• GET /v3/company/{realmID}/taxrate/{taxrateId} reads a tax rate.
• GET /v3/company/{realmID}/taxcode/{taxcodeId} reads a tax code.
• POST /v3/company/{realmID}/taxagency adds the agency you remit tax to.

Underneath all of these, GET /v3/company/{realmID}/query lets software ask the books a question in a simple SELECT statement, such as every unpaid invoice for one customer. The same API also covers budgets, deposits, journal entries and the chart of accounts, which you can find under General Ledger Management and Budgeting Management.

Getting started

QuickBooks is freemium with self-serve signup on the Intuit developer site. Start with the QuickBooks Online developer docs and the OAuth 2.0 guide; there is also a GraphQL option and separate payroll and time docs. Intuit’s partner tiers and fees are summarized in the pricing section of the APIs.io profile.

The QuickBooks profile on APIs.io lists every API, including the Bill API, the Balance Sheet API, the AR Aging Summary API and the Batch API for doing many changes at once. Pick the one task your team re-keys most often and make that your first connection.