How to use financial statement APIs successfully

Financial statements offer invaluable data for your product and internal applications.

To better understand why integrating this data with other applications can prove invaluable and to help you implement any integration yourself, we’ll cover how a few real-world endpoints work and share several impactful integration use cases.

But first, let’s align on the definition of a financial statement API.

What is a financial statement API?

It’s an endpoint that lets you access and interact with data within a financial statement, whether it's a balance sheet, an income statement, a cash flow statement, etc.

Related: What is a tax rate API?

Examples of financial statement APIs

Many of the largest accounting tools don't offer out-of-the-box endpoint support for income, cashflow, and balance sheets, and require you to build custom logic through different methods to aggregate these reports.

That said, Xero is a great example of an API provider that offers at least some out-of-the-box endpoint support.

The accounting solution lets you access several financial statement endpoints via GET requests. Here are just a few of these endpoints (see the full list here):

• Use <code class="blog_inline-code">https://api.xero.com/finance.xro/1.0/financialstatements/balancesheet</code> to fetch balance sheets. You can also use balanceDate as a query parameter to get information on a specific balance sheet report

• Use <code class="blog_inline-code">https://api.xero.com/finance.xro/1.0/financialstatements/cashflow</code> to retrieve cash flow statements outside of the U.S. (currently not supported in the U.S.). You can also use startDate and endDate parameters to customize the cash report; if no parameters are used, you’ll get a cash flow statement from the last 12 months

• Use <code class="blog_inline-code">https://api.xero.com/finance.xro/1.0/financialstatements/profitandloss</code> to get a detailed profit and loss statement. Like the cashflow endpoint, you can use startDate and endDate query parameters to specify the time frame for your report. Otherwise, it’ll be the last 12 months

Related: How to integrate with Xero’s API

Financial statement API use cases

Here are a few ways to use financial statement APIs with internal applications and with customers’ accounting systems.

Sync financial statements with your BI tool to uncover key insights

To help your analysts identify opportunities and risks based on your financial data, you can integrate your ERP system with your BI solution (e.g., Tableau) and sync a wide range of financial statement data once per day.

You can also add logic to your integration to allow certain types of data to get added to specific reports automatically. 

Build alerts in your business communications platform when financial data crosses a predefined threshold

To help your finance team become aware of issues on time, you can integrate your accounting system with an app like Slack and build a flow where once a certain type of data is higher or lower than expected (e.g., an operating expense is higher than expected), the finance team gets notified in a specific Slack channel. The notification can also include details on the issue to help finance understand and address it quickly.

Power an AI copilot to create actionable financial models

Say you offer a financial planning tool and want to help customers realize value from your platform quickly and easily. 

To remove any friction, you can integrate with customers’ accounting systems, feed their financial statement data to your machine learning model and continually do so on a predefined cadence (e.g., every 24 hours). 

Using your ML model, you can then build a product feature that calculates financial metrics from the integrated data—gross profit, runway, burn rate, etc.—and displays this data in fully-customizable models.

Enable customers to analyze different financial scenarios 

Say you offer a financial modeling platform that helps customers review and forecast their cash balance, cashflow, and expenses for any number of scenarios.

To help customers adopt your platform quickly, you can integrate with their accounting systems and sync—and consistently re-sync—the financial statement data from their systems. Your platform can then auto-populate and frequently update its dashboards, all but ensuring customers use the latest data.

Related: What is an accounting integration?

Access all of your customers’ financial data with Merge

Merge, the leading unified API solution, lets you integrate with more than a dozen accounting systems by simply building to its unified API.

In addition, Merge lets you sync a comprehensive set of data through its Cash Flow Statements, Balance Sheets, and Income Statements Common Models. And Merge provides advanced features—Field Mapping, Authenticated Passthrough, and Remote Data—to help you access and sync custom financial statement data from any customer.

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