Creating your first app with Intuit Developer

The first step to building an application that connects to QuickBooks, the small business accounting software used by more than a million small businesses, is to create an application on Intuit Developer. In this post we’ll go through the process of creating a developer account as well as your first application.

First open up a browser and head over to https://developer.intuit.com/.

Look in the top right corner for the ‘Sign In’ button and give it a click. You should then see a dialog box pop up for you to enter your credentials.

If you have already created an Intuit Developer account you can just sign in and skip the next step. If you a creating an account, click on ‘Create an account’ at the bottom of the modal.

Here you can fill out all of the relevant information that you will need to create your account. The email address is particularly important as it is what we will use to tell you about changes to the APIs you are building your application with, as well as any updates for you application when it is being reviewed for launch on apps.com.

Once you are logged in you will see a couple options on how to create your first app. You can either try out one of the sample applications to get a feel for how the APIs works, or dive head first into building out your own app. In this example we are building an application from scratch, so click on ‘Select APIs’.

Now you have the option to pick out which APIs you want ‘turned on’ for your application. The accounting API is the most popular API and lets you interact with end-user’s QuickBooks Online accounts. The payments API allows your application to accept and process online payments. The other two APIs are more specialized, but the Financial Data API can let your application pull information from banks and other financial institutions.

Once you have selected the APIs you want to use (accounting, payments, or both) click on the ‘create app’ button and your first app will be created! Now you can start to take advantage of our many libraries and SDKs to build out your integration to small businesses.