QBO API update could lead to strange formatting for the unprepared

Starting Sept. 1, Intuit will be updating the QuickBooks Online Reports API, something that most CPAs won't notice unless their vendors or internal tech teams have not made slight adjustments in response to the change, in which case CPAs will likely notice very much. 

The change does not affect people who work directly within QuickBooks Online but those who connect to it via a third party integration, whether that's through another solutions vendor or a custom integration coded by the organization itself. 

The upcoming change was first announced in March with a projected June deadline that was then extended to September. The API is being updated to use the same service that powers the modern view of the reports. Intuit said there is no need to make changes to the API request URL and body, but warned there are some differences expected in the API responses.

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The specific changes include improved consistency for null values, the introduction of a new summarize column by fiscal year command, dynamically generated row orders, updates to account hierarchy, a bug fix for payment methods (that had previously been mapped to transaction type), an update to summarization by days, the removal of support for the qzurl parameter, updated row types for sections, ColTitle casing changes, StartPeriod and EndPeriod now always being returned, split accounts now returning an empty value, the removal of group_by parameter and other undocumented parameters, and the deprecation of non-documented reports. 

Joe Manganelli, chief revenue officer for business automation platform Amalgam, said the change is a result of accumulated technical debt within QuickBooks. This is just one of many things Intuit is updating as QuickBooks transitions from classic view to what it calls modern view. While the deadline was originally in June, he said it was clear at that time that many organizations were not yet ready, which is why the company extended it to September.  

The change is less about the data itself and more about the presentation of that data. For those who have not adjusted to the new API, columns might line up differently, rows could move to different places, account hierarchies might look more nested or indented, labels might change places, zeroes might be replaced with blank cells, and in certain cases items might not appear or stop refreshing.

"Depending on how your product is built, it could have severe consequences. … If you're on the practitioner side, and let's say you built your own internal API, that may have impacts to you," said Manganelli. "Practitioners who are a little more tech-forward might experience something. I'd also say it will be a learning experience for those practitioners who've been Claude Coding their way through automations. A lot of them have not necessarily come across things where a provider just changes something or the data structures are different, and so it will be interesting to see how, in their new life as a developer slash practitioner, they will be affected by something like this,"

Jessica McKellar, CEO of Pilot, a bookkeeping, tax and outsourced CFO services company, is well aware of this change as her practice makes extensive use of the reports API. She confirmed they will need to change their API calls ahead of the migration going live. However she said it won't be a major lift. It mostly means her company has needed to allocate some extra engineering time to update what it does with the results of these API calls. It's mostly writing and testing code: She noted people can test the post-Aug. 31 behavior by adding the temporary "testing_migration" query parameter to a report request (e.g., .../reports/ProfitAndLoss?...&testing_migration). That routes the request through the new backend. Overall, she said, the changes will be mostly visual.

"This will likely mostly manifest as reports looking weird for any companies or tools that don't complete this migration," she said.

However, she added, "One change they are making as part of this is that undocumented parameters/reports are going away, so if someone has been utilizing any undocumented parameters or reports, those will in theory not work anymore, as opposed to just looking weird." 

Manganelli said it has mostly been developers, not practitioners, who have been feeling the pain preparing for this change.

Evan O'Brien, co-founder and chief technology officer of LiveFlow, a finance operations solutions provider, confirmed that things have been busy at his company while preparing for the update. LiveFlow takes QuickBooks Online data and brings it directly into Excel and Google Sheets, allowing finance and accounting teams to automate their reporting to eliminate hours of manual work. Much of this functionality is powered by the QuickBooks API. He said that, over the past few months, the company has had to create workarounds for almost every breaking change and needed to adapt to many other unexpected changes as well. 

Two things in particular have hit them especially hard: the deprecation of many foundational reports, such as Transaction Detail, Balance Sheet Detail, Sales by Customer Detail, Sales by Product/Service Detail, Invoice List, Vendor Contact List, Customer Contact List, Unpaid Bills, and Unbilled Charges, among 29 in total; plus the removal of API capability that enabled LiveFlow's popular Drill Down feature to surface the underlying transactions for every figure without needing to go back into QBO. 

He acknowledged that customers won't like that, but it would be much worse without the "relentless efforts of our engineering team." He said the team has been working around the clock to minimize impact and ensure continuity of customer reporting. While they won't be able to restore every single report before Aug. 31, they do expect more than 90% of their customers' Transaction Detail use-cases to continue uninterrupted.

"For other cases, we will not be able to refresh them for a little while — some for days, others for a few weeks — but we'll restore them as soon as we can. It won't be long before we bring back Drill Down too!" said O'Brien.

LiveFlow has needed to recreate the reports from the underlying objects (bills, invoices, payments, journal entries, etc.), which he said has been extremely challenging. But on the bright side, the effort has also given the company access to a level of detail that he said has unlocked new opportunities to build previously impossible capabilities for customers. 

"We'll build a whole new custom reporting system, allowing our customers unique abilities to create the reports of their dreams, without depending on pivots, janky formulas or lookup tables. We'll build two-way sync, to create and update all these records in QBO, through Drill Down, through spreadsheets, and through Claude and ChatGPT — all with data validation and seamless approval flows," he said.

LiveFlow is going to apply the same ideas to new integrations with services like Ramp and Bill.com too, he added. 

While this has been a very difficult few months, he said he appreciates that software and APIs do have to evolve over time. 

"The QuickBooks team has been doing its best to help us work around the expected challenges and fix a lot of unexpected issues too," he said. "It can't be easy for their teams either."