Clear Books API

Name: Clear Books API API
Brand: Clear Books API
Availability: InStock

✓ Official Vendor SpecFinanceAccountingoauth263 EndpointsREST

For Agents

Create and manage Clear Books invoices, bills, customers, suppliers, payments, journals, and bank feeds via 63 OAuth2-secured endpoints. Useful for UK accounting automation and bookkeeping sync.

Connect the Clear Books API to your agent

Jentic One is a self-hosted execution layer for AI agents. It lets your agent call the Clear Books API, or any other public or private API you need. You set the rules, the agent never sees your credentials, and every call is logged.

Install Jentic One Beta (Self-Hosted)

Jentic One Host machine

# On the machine that will host your Jentic One instance:
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jentic/jentic-one/main/tools/install.sh | sh

Agent machine

# On the machine where your agent runs (keep this separate from the instance):
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jentic/jentic-one/main/tools/install.sh | sh
jentic register       # connects your agent to your Jentic One instance

Jentic One is in public beta. The setup above keeps your agent separate from the instance, which is what you want before using real credentials: an agent running as the same OS user as Jentic One can read its stored keys directly. Just evaluating? A single local install is fine to start. See the secure deployment guide for the tiers.

Capabilities

What an agent can do with Clear Books API API.

Create and update invoices, quotes, bills, and expenses across sales and purchase document types

Manage customer and supplier records including bulk listing and per-record updates

Record payments and allocate them against sales or purchase documents

Post journal entries and read posted transactions for reconciliation

GET STARTED

Start building with Clear Books API API

Explore with Jentic

View OpenAPI Document

The Clear Books API provides programmatic access to Clear Books, a UK-focused cloud accounting platform. It exposes the accounting domain as REST resources — businesses, account codes, bank accounts, customers, suppliers, sales documents (invoices and quotes), purchase documents (bills and expenses), payments, allocations, stock items, transactions, journals, VAT, and bank feeds. Authentication is OAuth 2.0 authorisation code with granular per-resource scopes, and the API supports paginated reads with X-Pagination-* response headers. It is designed for accountants, bookkeepers, and ISVs that need to sync trading activity, VAT data, or bank movements into Clear Books.

Use Cases

Patterns agents use Clear Books API API for, with concrete tasks.

★ Automated invoice creation from a sales pipeline

Service businesses that win deals in a CRM need invoices raised in Clear Books without rekeying. POST /accounting/sales/{salesType} with salesType=invoice creates the invoice in Clear Books from the won deal payload, and POST /accounting/customers ensures the contact exists first. This keeps invoice numbering sequential in the accounting system and removes the swivel-chair work between sales and finance.

When a deal is marked won in HubSpot, ensure the customer exists via GET/POST /accounting/customers, then POST /accounting/sales/invoice with the deal value to create the invoice

Bank feed and statement ingestion

Banks that are not natively supported by Clear Books bank feeds can be ingested through the API. POST to the bank feeds and bank statements endpoints (declared under /accounting/bankFeeds and /accounting/bankStatements scopes) pushes daily statement data so transactions are matched against invoices and bills. This lets businesses with niche bank accounts still benefit from Clear Books reconciliation without manual CSV uploads.

Each morning, fetch yesterday's transactions from the bank's API and POST them to the Clear Books bank statements endpoint for the matching bank account

VAT return preparation

Quarterly VAT returns require pulling sales, purchase, and VAT data from the accounting system. GET /accounting/sales/{salesType}, GET /accounting/purchases/{purchaseType}, and the VAT read endpoints supply the inputs. Running this on the first day of the new quarter lets the bookkeeper review the figures before submission.

On the first of each quarter, pull all sales and purchase documents for the previous three months and the VAT info to prepare the return spreadsheet

Customer and supplier directory sync

Businesses that maintain a master contact directory in another system push updates to Clear Books to keep customer and supplier addresses, payment terms, and contact details current. PATCH /accounting/customers/{customerId} and PATCH /accounting/suppliers/{supplierId} update individual records, while the GET endpoints support full directory diffs. This avoids the directory drift that causes invoices to be sent to old addresses.

Diff the master directory against GET /accounting/customers and PATCH each record where the billing address has changed

AI agent integration via Jentic

A bookkeeper's AI assistant uses Jentic to discover Clear Books endpoints by intent and execute them with OAuth tokens stored in the Jentic vault. The agent can raise an invoice, allocate a payment, or pull VAT figures from natural-language requests, and the underlying authorisation code grant tokens are refreshed automatically. The single-token-per-user constraint is respected because Jentic manages the connection state for the agent.

Receive 'invoice ABC Ltd for 1500 GBP for consulting' from chat, search Jentic for Clear Books invoice creation, and execute POST /accounting/sales/invoice with the parsed values

Key Endpoints

63 endpoints — the clear books api provides programmatic access to clear books, a uk-focused cloud accounting platform.

METHOD

PATH

DESCRIPTION

POST

/accounting/sales/{salesType}

Create a sales document such as an invoice or quote

POST

/accounting/purchases/{purchaseType}

Create a purchase document such as a bill

POST

/accounting/customers

Create a customer record

POST

/accounting/suppliers

Create a supplier record

GET

/accounting/bankAccounts

List bank accounts

POST

/accounting/accountCodes

Create an account code

GET

/businesses

List all businesses for the current user

POST

/accounting/sales/{salesType}

Create a sales document such as an invoice or quote

POST

/accounting/purchases/{purchaseType}

Create a purchase document such as a bill

POST

/accounting/customers

Create a customer record

POST

/accounting/suppliers

Create a supplier record

GET

/accounting/bankAccounts

List bank accounts

Why though Jentic?

Three things that make agents converge on Jentic-routed access.

Credential isolation

Clear Books OAuth 2.0 client secrets and refresh tokens are stored encrypted in the Jentic vault. Refresh tokens are single-use and rotated by Jentic at execution time, so the agent never holds the long-lived credential and the platform's one-token-per-user constraint is preserved.

Intent-based discovery

Agents query Jentic with intents like 'create a sales invoice' or 'push a bank statement' and Jentic returns the matching Clear Books operation along with its scoped OAuth requirements, so the agent does not need to map scopes to endpoints by hand.

Time to first call

Direct Clear Books integration: 2-4 days for OAuth flow setup, scope selection, refresh-token plumbing, and pagination handling. Through Jentic: under 1 hour — search, load schema, execute.

Related APIs

Alternatives and complements available in the Jentic catalogue.

Alternative

Xero Accounting API

Global cloud accounting platform with broader market coverage

Choose Xero for multi-country deployments; choose Clear Books for UK-specific workflows and customer base

Alternative

Sage API

Established accounting and ERP suite

Choose Sage when integrating with mid-market UK firms already standardised on Sage; Clear Books targets small business and bookkeeping practices

Complementary

Flutterwave API

Payment processing platform for transaction capture

Pair a payment processor with Clear Books to record settled payments against the matching invoice via /accounting/payments

FAQs

Specific to using Clear Books API API through Jentic.

What authentication does the Clear Books API use?

Clear Books uses OAuth 2.0 with the Authorization Code grant only — no client credentials or implicit flow. Confidential clients are required, and PKCE is supported and recommended. Single-use refresh tokens are issued alongside access tokens. Through Jentic, the OAuth client and refresh token are stored in the encrypted vault and refreshed automatically.

What are the rate limits for the Clear Books API?

Applications making more than 5 requests per second for a sustained period may be throttled with HTTP 429 responses. Retries should use exponential backoff. Limits are not hard-coded and may change without notice, so your client should always honour 429 responses.

Can I create UK VAT-aware invoices through the Clear Books API?

Yes. POST /accounting/sales/{salesType} with salesType=invoice creates an invoice, and the VAT read endpoints expose the VAT settings used for return preparation. Combine with GET /accounting/customers to ensure the customer record exists before raising the invoice.

How do I push bank statements into Clear Books for reconciliation?

Use the bank statements endpoint under the accounting.bank_statements:write scope to push transactions for a given bank account. Combine with GET /accounting/bankAccounts to identify the target account ID. This is the standard pattern when a bank is not covered by Clear Books native feeds.

How do I raise a Clear Books invoice through Jentic?

Install the SDK with pip install jentic, search Jentic for 'create a clear books invoice', load the schema, and execute. Jentic manages the OAuth refresh-token rotation so the agent never holds the long-lived credential, and the single-active-token constraint per user is respected.

How does pagination work on the Clear Books API?

Paginated endpoints accept limit (max 200) and page parameters, and responses include X-Pagination-Limit, X-Pagination-Current-Page, X-Pagination-Total-Pages, and X-Pagination-Total-Count headers. Use the total-pages header to plan a full-table sync without making an extra count call.