Get started overview

Before you start

Four things exist before your first API call. Your Taxbit implementation manager walks through them in your Integration Planning Session, and the Help Center covers the Dashboard side.

• Access to the Taxbit Dashboard. Taxbit provisions a sandbox organization and a production organization for you and adds your first users; after that you add users yourself. Each organization has its own credentials and data. Test in your sandbox covers how the two differ.
• API credentials. The Developer Settings page (Settings > Developer Settings) holds your Organization ID, client_id, and client_secret. The API calls an organization a tenant, so tenant_id is your Organization ID. Store the secret in your secret manager, never in source control or client code. Credentials can't be rotated from Developer Settings; if one is exposed, ask your implementation manager, or Taxbit Support after go-live, to rotate it.
• A filer. The legal entity responsible for information reporting and filing, one per filing entity, set up in the Dashboard under Settings > Filer Setup; see Filer Setup in the Help Center. Account owners and accounts can't be created until your organization has a filer marked as the default. To automate it, POST /v1/filers creates the same record.
• A server-side environment. Tokens are requested and used from your backend. Apart from the React SDK, nothing in these guides runs in a browser, and the SDK receives a short-lived account owner token from your backend, never your credentials.

Your Integration Planning Session also settles how the activity on your platform maps onto Taxbit's transaction types (the Transactions reference lists every type) and, if you send crypto or precious-metal transactions, which assets to configure; see Configure your assets.

Your integration path

1. Authenticate: request a tenant-scoped bearer token from your backend with POST /v1/oauth/token. It is valid for 24 hours.
2. Create account owners and accounts: an account owner for each of your end users, and an account for their activity, as they onboard.
3. Transactions or form data: send transactions for Taxbit to aggregate and compute from, or form data with the final amounts if you already aggregate.
4. Test in your sandbox: run the cycle against your sandbox organization.
5. Go live: point the same code at production, backfill historical data, usually by CSV on the Ingest page, and run your first tax season.

Collecting tax documentation in your app (W-9s, W-8s, seller data, and self-certifications) is the Tax Documentation React SDK. Delivering recipient copies in your app is Retrieve US tax forms or Retrieve DAC7 and MRDP recipient copies. Each product section says which of these apply to you: US Information Reporting, Cost Basis, MRDP & DAC7 Reporting, and CARF & DAC8 Reporting.

Two objects you need before anything else

Almost every integration problem Taxbit sees traces back to these two. An account owner is the person or entity whose tax data you are collecting. An account is a container of activity belonging to that account owner. Transactions attach to accounts, and tax documentation attaches to account owners. See the Account Owners and Accounts reference.

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Create the account owner before you mount the SDK

The SDK authenticates with an account owner token, which your backend requests with POST /v1/oauth/account-owner-token using the account owner's ID. The token lasts one hour. The account owner must already exist when the SDK loads, or the SDK cannot load that account owner's questionnaire. Create the account owner from your backend during signup, not at the moment the account owner opens the form. This is the most common cause of a questionnaire that fails to load.

Questions

During implementation, contact your Taxbit implementation manager. After go-live, contact Taxbit Support: Taxbit Assist in the bottom-left corner of the Dashboard, or the submission form on Contacting Taxbit Customer Support. The FAQ has short answers to the questions integrators ask most.