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Expense Management Use Cases with Our Accounting Unified API
Expense Management Use Cases with Our Accounting Unified API

Expense management companies can to POST payments, invoices, bills, and expenses to their customer’s accounting system of choice.

Updated this week

Expense management companies expect to POST payments, invoices, bills, and expenses to their customer’s accounting system of choice. With Merge, that entire flow is possible with a single API.

Here are two different workflows you can achieve with our Accounting Unified API. We’ll use Quickbooks Online as an example integration your customer would use.

Pre-Work

Make sure you have Merge up and running with either a Test or Production Linked Account created. You can follow our Get Started Guide to access the best sandbox Accounts for Accounting.

Record Credit Card Purchases

Overall Goal: Record Credit Card purchases to your customer’s accounting system, whether or not an invoice exists for that payment.

Scenario: Your app allows your user to record payments made via a credit card into their accounting platform.

Overall Approach: Maintain an accurate record of invoices with our GET /Invoices endpoint. Use our POST /Payments and POST /Invoices endpoints to record payments back into the accounting system, whether or not an invoice already exists.

STEP 1: Know Available Invoices

  • Goal: In your own app, maintain an accurate record of active invoices from your user's accounting system.

  • Approach: Periodically pull invoices from your users’ accounting system using our GET /Invoices endpoint.

STEP 2a: Record Payment if Invoice Exists

  • Goal: When your user records a credit card payment in your app for an existing payment, send back the payment and the amount into their account

  • Approach: Once the payment is made, populate a payload to our POST /Payments objects with the record of the transaction.

    • TIP: Don’t worry about matching up invoice IDs in your own code. If the invoice exists in the remote system, we automatically match our merge_id to the accounting systems ID for the invoice.

STEP 2b: Record a Payment if the Invoice Doesn’t Exist

  • Goal: Allow your user to both create a new invoice, and attach a payment to that existing invoice.

  • Approach:

    • First, record the Invoice back into your user's accounting platform using our POST /Invoice endpoint.

    • Then, simply follow the steps from Step 2a, only use the merge_id of the invoice that you just created.

Transfer Money

Overall Goal: Allow users to transfer money between accounts and have a record of the transaction.

Scenario: An employee transfers money from one account within your app to another.

Overall Approach: Your app will then automate a recording of this information as a journal entry, using the following steps:

Step 1. Create transfer record

  • Goal: Create a record of the transfer for both the sending account and the receiving account.

  • Approach: Using POST /journal-entries, create two objects within the lines array, to record both the transfer out of the sending account, as well as the transfer to the receiving account.

    • Tips:

      • Within the ‘lines’ array of the Journal Entries object, the ‘account’ field specifies where the transfer is going to / from. You can extract the Accounts ID from the Accounts model.

      • For the net_amount field, use either + or - along with the amount to specify the direction of the transfer. For example, if you are crediting an account, assign - to the net_amount. If you are debiting an account, assign a + to net_amount.

Step 2: GET /Journal-Entries to see reflections of all transactions

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