Get access to your API keys and start building with Codat today.
Many organizations, from start-ups to enterprises and cash flow forecasting apps to digital lenders, rely on gaining consented access to their customers’ data. Unfortunately, this often means sinking significant time, money, and resources into building and maintaining integrations, or worse, relying on your customers to share their financial information manually.
Codat offers a better solution. We vastly simplify the task of providing a connected experience to your customers by consolidating multiple data sources, so you can move data around seamlessly and at scale.
In this blog post, we explain how to get started with Codat by walking you through the processes of:
- Preparing for your first connection
- Getting connected
- Exploring the API
What does Codat do differently?
Codat provides real-time connectivity to over 30 different financial platforms, so SaaS providers and financial institutions can build better-integrated products for their SME customers. This includes everything from a payment provider like Zettle by PayPal offering automatic sales reconciliation to save their merchants hours of admin to a digital bank like Judo creating a frictionless and secure loan application journey.
Data processed via Codat’s Accounting, Commerce, and Banking APIs is standardized, synchronized, and secure. Codat also provides use case-specific products that solve even more problems for our clients. Assess, our credit risk data product, for example, surfaces helpful insights on your customers using auto-calculated metrics and ratios and cross-referenced data sources, as well as normalizing raw accounting data to a single chart of accounts to streamline lenders’ internal processes.
Sound like a game-changer? Our clients think so.
“Our decision to work with Codat was based on their extensive integration ecosystem in our core markets and their ability to cleanly connect complicated external data sets with our software. With their integrations, we can focus more on where our expertise lie, building financial analytics software, without having to switch focus and resources to connecting customers’ data sources.”
Cameron Murphy, Head of Growth at Calqulate
Getting started quickly with Codat
It’s simple to get up and running quickly with Codat. Creating an account is free and provides access to everything you need to enable, set up, and manage Codat products and connect customers. Even switching on live integrations doesn’t need to hold you back, as you can start building and testing with various sets of sandbox data.
To kick things off, simply navigate to the Products & plans page to select the products you’d like to enable. Our Accounting, Commerce, and Open Banking APIs are enabled by default.
Building with Codat is often easier if you use Swagger to explore the APIs. You can use the ‘Login’ button in Swagger to authenticate with your open instance of Codat. Simply follow the instructions below.
- In a new tab, open our Swagger documentation.
- In the top right of Swagger, select ‘Authorize’.
- On the pop-up window, you can either enter your API Key and then click the ‘Authorize’ button or click the ‘Login’ button at the bottom, where you will be prompted to log in to your Codat account.
Once logged in, you can make API queries against your Codat instance. For example, you can click on the /companies endpoint to retrieve a list of Companies in your Codat instance.
Set up your integrations 🔀
Ready to set up your first integration? Simply navigate to Integrations in the Portal to select the platforms you’d like your customers to be able to link from the list provided. You can choose from accounting platforms like Xero, QuickBooks Online, MYOB, and commerce systems such as Stripe, Amazon, and PayPal. You can even access banking data using TrueLayer and Plaid.
We’d recommend starting with the financial platforms most commonly used by your customers. Some may require more set-up than others. You may have to register for a Developer account, for example.
Set up Link 🎨
Via Codat, your customers can connect their financial platforms in minutes using Link, your pre-built SMB auth journey. You can embed Link directly in your app or grab the URL for Link in our Portal to share with customers via email.
Customer trust is crucial, and we recognize the importance of making this user journey as consistent and seamless as possible. That’s why Link is a fully white-labelled and conversion-optimized solution.
Every week, thousands of small businesses worldwide use Link to connect their accounts to a variety of different providers and for a wide variety of reasons. All this usage has enabled us to optimize their journey. Your customers are guided through the connection process. They can clearly see their progress, and understand exactly what information they are sharing at each step. To make it as easy as possible for customers to share their data with confidence, we recommend using Link.
Simply navigate to the Account Profile page to customize your company name, logo, and icons and then visit the Link page to set up custom redirect URLs and specify the messaging your customers will see at each flow stage.
You can find step-by-step instructions for setting up your company branding here.
Prefer to use our API to develop your own authorization journey? If you want to build to our API directly, you can explore the API endpoints and schemas in our Swagger documentation, and our getting started guide for Developers.
Getting connected 🔗
Once you’ve set up your authorization flow, you’re ready to try linking your first company. Simply add a company name and share the auto-generated URL with the company you want to connect. You can find step-by-step instructions for linking a company here.
You can monitor your connections on an ongoing basis in the Portal. This will help you spot and solve issues on the go.
Need a hand? If you have any questions or issues, you can contact our support team at [email protected] at any time.
Explore the API 🔎
The Codat API provides a rich set of resources, with over 40 different groups of endpoints and support for viewing, creating, updating, and deleting records.
Codat provides JSON-formatted responses, robust error handling, and webhooks on every status change. Data types have logical schemas to represent complex business data, such as orders, payments, and taxes. The API is secured using an OAuth 2.0 authorization flow.
Try a simple call in Swagger 🤯
With companies now connected, you’re free to explore the data available via Swagger and here’s how:
- With the Company ID to hand, head over to Swagger.
- Select the endpoint you’d like to test out.
- Click ‘Try it out’ and input the Company ID.
- Select ‘Execute’.
It really is that easy.
Examine the data 📊
Once you’ve connected a few companies, you’re ready to start exploring the data. Head over to the Company page in the Portal and select the linked company you’d like to look into. From here, you can explore things like the connected company’s recent activity log, their aged debtor’s report for a specific time period, and even drill into the details of their entire invoice history.
Where to next?
Congratulations, you’re all set up! Now that you’ve grasped the basics, there’s so much more to explore. You could try:
- Setting up and syncing different integration types.
- Assessing the financial performance of the connected companies by syncing more data such as our Financial Reports, Balance Sheet, Profit & Loss, and Cashflow Statement.
- Exploring the granular detail of your connected company’s financials.
Useful resources
We want to make sure you get the most out of Codat, and the resources below will help you do just that.
Looking for a helping hand or just have a few questions? Contact our specialist team at [email protected].