Can you provide QuickBooks API access for historical client data to build our internal dashboard, including any API limits, restrictions, and charges?

Yes, you can pull historical accounting and transaction data into your dashboard through the QuickBooks Online Accounting API, and setting up developer access itself is free. Here's how each piece works.

Getting API access

1. Create a free account at the Intuit Developer Portal, separate from your regular QuickBooks Online login.
2. From your developer dashboard, create an app and select QuickBooks Online. This generates your client ID and client secret, plus a free sandbox company for testing.
3. Each of your clients' QuickBooks Online companies will need to individually connect and authorize your app through OAuth 2.0, since access is scoped per company (per "realm ID"). There's no single connection that pulls data across all your managed clients at once, so each client authorizes the connection to their own books.

Endpoints for historical accounting data

The Accounting API covers the core entities you'd need for a consolidated dashboard: invoices, bills, payments, customers, vendors, accounts, and journal entries, queried directly or pulled through the built-in Reports API (profit and loss, balance sheet, transaction lists, and similar). How far back you can pull data through the API depends on how far back the client's own QuickBooks Online company data goes, not a separate API-imposed cutoff.

Limitations to plan around

• Report responses (profit and loss, balance sheet, transaction list) are capped at 400,000 cells, so Intuit recommends keeping each report request to about a six-month date range and pulling longer histories in multiple calls.
• Standard queries return a maximum of 1,000 entities per call, so larger datasets need pagination.
• Some fields, reconciliation data, and advanced configuration details aren't fully exposed through the API even though they're visible in the QuickBooks Online interface.

Costs and whether this fits your existing subscription

API access itself runs on a separate track from your QuickBooks Online subscription, through Intuit's App Partner Program. As of this program's rollout, API calls are split into two types:

• Core calls (mostly creating or updating records) are free and unmetered on every tier.
• CorePlus calls (mostly reading data and pulling reports, which is what your dashboard would rely on) are metered. The free Builder tier includes 500,000 CorePlus calls per month at no cost. Beyond that, paid tiers (Silver, Gold, Platinum) add higher monthly credit allotments with per-call overage pricing.

For a reporting dashboard like yours, you'd likely start on the free Builder tier and only need to consider a paid tier if your combined client data volume pushes past that monthly CorePlus allowance.

Full tier and pricing details can be found here: Intuit App Partner Program Guide