Create account owners and accounts

An account owner is the person or entity whose tax data you collect. An account is a container of that account owner's activity: transactions attach to accounts, and tax documentation attaches to account owners. Create both from your backend as account owners onboard, before an account owner opens anything Taxbit renders.

By the end of this page you have an account owner and an account in Taxbit that share your own identifiers, ready to receive transactions or form data, sent as form items.

Before you begin

• A bearer token. See Authenticate your tenant.
• A default filer in your organization. Without one, POST /v1/account-owners returns a 400 with {"message": "No default filer is configured for this organization.", "error": "Bad Request"}, and POST /v1/accounts fails as well. Create the filer first, marked as the default: see Set up your filer.
• Your own identifiers for the account owner and the account. Taxbit stores yours and returns its own taxbit_id alongside.

Create an account owner

Send your identifier and the account owner type. INDIVIDUAL, ENTITY, and INTERMEDIARY are the accepted types. Nothing else is required to start; the names, TINs, and addresses used to file are collected later, through the Tax Documentation React SDK or Collect recipient tax data.

curl -X POST $BASE_URL/v1/account-owners \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "id": "usr_8a3b1c9d",
    "account_owner_type": "INDIVIDUAL",
    "name": "Dana Whitfield",
    "email": "[email protected]"
  }'

{
  "data": {
    "id": "usr_8a3b1c9d",
    "taxbit_id": "424cd1a7-981e-4df0-9dfc-639a092fb369",
    "date_created": "2026-03-02T15:04:11.000Z",
    "date_modified": "2026-03-02T15:04:11.000Z",
    "name": "Dana Whitfield",
    "email": "[email protected]",
    "prefers_physical_mail": false
  }
}

This endpoint is rate limited and returns 429 above the limit. If your onboarding volume is high, ask your implementation manager for your organization's limit.

Create an account

Send your identifier for the account and the account_owner_id you used above. The account owner must already exist. If your organization has more than one filer, pass filer_id to say which one this account reports under; with a single filer, accounts attach to it.

curl -X POST $BASE_URL/v1/accounts \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "id": "acct_5f2e7d10",
    "account_owner_id": "usr_8a3b1c9d",
    "establishment_date": "2026-03-02"
  }'

{
  "data": {
    "id": "acct_5f2e7d10",
    "taxbit_id": "0177df49-c1aa-4d0b-bbeb-67a0c1b33a94",
    "account_owner_id": "usr_8a3b1c9d",
    "date_created": "2026-03-02",
    "date_modified": "2026-03-02",
    "establishment_date": "2026-03-02",
    "prefers_physical_mail": false
  }
}

An account inherits its filer's default cost-basis method (disposition_method). To override it for this account, pass disposition_method (HIFO, FIFO, LIFO, LOFO, or AUSTRIA) when you create it. Changing it later works through the cost-basis method history, not through PATCH; see Setting disposition methods.

Create both in one request

When each account owner has exactly one account, POST /v1/account-owners accepts an account object and creates both together. The account's id may equal the account owner's id. See the Account Owners reference for the nested fields.

Country fields

Country fields on account owners and accounts, including address, mailing address, tax residency, and country of birth, take an ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 code such as US or DE, not a country name. These fields are not validated on these endpoints: a full name such as Germany returns a success response and is stored as sent, so send the code.

How owners and accounts relate

• One owner, one account. Common where an account owner can hold only one account, such as a marketplace or a payments platform.
• One owner, many accounts. Common where an account owner holds several account types, such as an individual with more than one IRA.

Either way, the account owner comes first, and every account links to one account owner and one filer.

Parameters

Only the fields used above. Full schemas: Create account owner and Create account.

Account owner

Account

Where to go next

Choose your data path: send transactions for Taxbit to compute, or send form data you compute yourself.