QuickBooks Online
Connect your customers' QuickBooks Online companies so your product can create invoices, sync customers, and read financial data without managing Intuit OAuth flows yourself. The customer's QBO admin grants consent on Intuit's screen; Askel stores the realmId and manages token refresh.
What you can do
Create and update invoices
POST invoices to a customer's QuickBooks Online company with line items, customer references, account codes, and due dates. Update existing invoices from draft to sent or void a cancelled invoice.
Manage the customer list
Create or update customer records in QBO including display name, email, billing address, and payment terms. Used to link your product's account records to the matching QBO customer object.
Read the chart of accounts
Fetch account names, types, and sub-types so your product can present valid account options when creating transactions. Covers income, expense, asset, and liability accounts.
Read and create payments
Fetch payment records linked to invoices to determine outstanding balances, or post a payment record when your product's billing system confirms receipt.
Fetch items and services
Read the QBO item list, including product and service items with income account references and default rates. Useful for mapping your product's SKUs to the customer's existing QBO items.
Read profit-and-loss and balance-sheet reports
Fetch QuickBooks Online's built-in financial reports as structured JSON. Lets your product surface revenue or expense data without asking the customer to export anything manually.
Pushing subscription invoices into a customer's QuickBooks company
You sell a SaaS recurring-billing platform. A new customer, Riverton Advisory Partners, bills their own clients monthly and wants each invoice your platform generates to appear automatically in their QuickBooks Online company for reconciliation. Riverton's bookkeeper currently re-types invoice data from your platform into QBO every month.
- 1
Admin connects QuickBooks
Riverton's admin clicks Connect QuickBooks Online in your product. Askel redirects to Intuit's consent screen. The admin selects the Riverton Advisory Partners company, approves the scopes, and Intuit issues an access token, a refresh token, and a realmId. Askel stores all three.
- 2
Account and item mapping
Askel reads Riverton's chart of accounts and item list. Your product's setup wizard shows them and Riverton's bookkeeper maps each billing line item in your platform to the matching QBO item and income account.
- 3
Customer sync
Askel reads Riverton's QBO customer list and your product links each of Riverton's end-clients to the matching QBO customer ID. New clients are created in QBO automatically via the Customer endpoint.
- 4
Invoice created on billing date
When your platform generates a monthly invoice for a Riverton client, Askel POSTs it to QBO as a draft invoice with the mapped line items, customer reference, and due date. The realmId is sent with every request so the write lands in Riverton's company, not another.
- 5
Payment reconciliation
When Riverton's client pays the invoice in your platform, your product calls Askel to create a payment record in QBO linked to the invoice. Riverton's bookkeeper sees balanced AR in QBO without typing anything.
OAuth 2.0
The customer's QuickBooks Online admin grants consent on Intuit's OAuth consent screen and selects the specific company to connect. Intuit returns an access token, a refresh token, and a realmId. Askel stores the refresh token and the realmId; the realmId is sent as a query parameter on every API request to scope it to the correct company. Access tokens expire after one hour and are refreshed automatically.
How Askel sits between your product and the customer's system
FAQ for QuickBooks Online
Does this work with QuickBooks Desktop or only QuickBooks Online?+
What Intuit API scopes does Askel request?+
Can a customer connect multiple QuickBooks companies?+
What happens when the refresh token expires?+
catching drift before it breaks, and hitting go-live dates.
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