QuickBooks Online is cloud accounting software from Intuit, which reports around 100 million customers across its products worldwide. Revenue from QuickBooks Online Accounting grew 23% in Intuit’s 2026 financial year.
In the UK it comes in five plans, from Sole Trader Plus and Simple Start through Essentials and Plus to Advanced, which allows 25 users. It’s HMRC-recognised for Making Tax Digital, and every plan is ready for MTD for Income Tax.
What the plans cover
Automated bank feeds come with every plan. Multi-currency starts at Essentials, while stock tracking, purchase orders, sales orders and project profitability arrive with Plus. Payroll is a separate add-on, with automatic RTI submissions to HMRC.
Accountants work in QuickBooks through Intuit Accountant Suite, which includes a free core tier, and more than 480,000 accountant partners use Intuit’s platform worldwide. Inside the software, Intuit Intelligence brings a generative AI assistant to everyday accounting tasks.
The API
The QuickBooks Online Accounting API is REST with JSON, covering invoices, sales receipts, payments, items, bills, purchase orders, journal entries and much more. Apps connect with OAuth 2.0: access tokens last an hour, and refresh tokens roll forward for up to five years.
Developers get up to ten sandbox companies, UK ones included, each valid for two years. Each company file allows 500 requests a minute, and batch requests bundle several operations into one call.
Webhooks and change tracking
Webhooks cover 29 kinds of record, from invoices and payments to bills and purchase orders, signed so the receiving system can verify them. For catching up, Change Data Capture returns everything that changed in the last 30 days.
The partner program
Since November 2025, UK developers have been part of Intuit’s App Partner Program, with Builder, Silver, Gold and Platinum tiers. Core API calls, the everyday accounting ones, stay unmetered, while a wider set called CorePlus is metered by tier. Newer APIs cover projects and custom fields, added in 2025, and sales orders, added in September 2026.
Purchase orders and payouts
QuickBooks Online’s API and webhooks reach most of the accounting a small business does, so other systems have plenty to send it. Shop and marketplace payouts can post as daily summaries that match the bank feed, purchase orders and bills can be read for the cost behind each product, and a paid invoice can update the CRM as soon as it clears.
If month-end still means matching payouts and invoices by hand, these red flags will look familiar, and this cost-benefit walk-through shows what the matching costs over a year.