Although B2B payments have historically been far more analog than B2C payments, there’s been a rapidly increasing trend towards digital payment methods – according to the AFP, over 75% of business payments are made through more streamlined approaches compared to cash and check. A sizable fraction of these payments are made with physical and virtual cards and this growth has been enabled by card issuing APIs like Marqueta, Lithic, and Deserve that make it easy for fintechs to spin up card programs for their customers.

With this new financial infrastructure, there’s an explosion of fintech products targeting businesses, so the bar is high to create products that are easy to use and eliminate manual work. When using corporate cards, businesses still need to track all of their spend in their accounting system with precision. Logging and mapping card payment data is typically extremely tedious and can lead to errors, delays, and unreliable reporting.

Power Expense Management Workflows with Rutter Write Accounting

With Rutter Write Accounting, we help you build accounting automation features faster by using our universal API to read and write data from your customers’ accounting system. Below we outline how you can use Rutter’s API endpoints to sync expense data.

Step 1: Business signs up & connects accounting system to your product

When a business signs up, you need to connect to their accounting system so you can read and write payment data.

To do this, use Rutter Link, which is our white-labeled authentication component that makes it easy to embed an OAuth flow into your application. Rutter will take care of managing any platform-specific tokens and authentication patterns.

Once a business authenticates, you probably want to get data on their vendors, chart of accounts, and any expense categories to display this information in your product. To do this, use Rutter’s GET endpoints for /vendors, /accounts, and /tracking_categories. Here’s an example:

Send a request to our GET /Accounts endpoint:

GET /Accounts Response

Step 2: Once approved, push the expense into accounting system

After a business properly codes the categories and accounts and approves an expense, they now want that information synced into their accounting system (so they don’t need to manually enter or upload this data).

To do this, use our POST /expenses endpoint to push the expenses and all relevant fields. Rutter abstracts away the complexity of pushing this data into the right section of the accounting ledger:

And just like that, you can use Rutter to quickly build accounting automation features to sync expense data! Integrate once and the data model and steps above work regardless of a business’s accounting system!