QuickBooks Partnership Guide: How to get listed in the QuickBooks marketplace

Offering an integration with QuickBooks means joining Intuit’s App Partner Program. Every organisation starts on the Builder tier automatically, and the entry requirement is the same at every level: an Intuit-approved app assessment questionnaire, acceptance of the current developer terms and ongoing compliance with the programme.

Intuit groups the benefits into build, engage and grow: tooling and analytics for the development itself, account management and technical consultation, then badging, marketplace reach and go-to-market support.

One constraint belongs at the top rather than in a footnote. The programme is available to partners based in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and Canada with the exception of Quebec, and the published rate card is region-specific.

This is the change that matters, and it is not a price rise. Intuit splits every call into Core and CorePlus, and the split follows the endpoint together with the HTTP method rather than the volume.

Core covers data-in work: creating and updating invoices, bills, customers, vendors. Intuit’s words are that these calls are “unmetered and uncharged”. CorePlus covers data-out work: reading accounts, querying company information, fetching reports. Those are metered.

So writing into a customer’s books is free and reading back out of them is the billable half. Xero arrived at the same place from a different direction, metering egress gigabytes rather than calls, which makes this a pattern across the market rather than one vendor’s pricing quirk.

Each tier includes a monthly allowance of metered calls, and what happens at the ceiling depends on which tier you are on. That difference is the single most important sentence in the programme for anyone still on the free tier.

The monthly fee buys benefits and an allowance. What it also buys, and what is easy to miss, is a better price on everything past that allowance.

The rate card underneath is banded by volume, and the bands move with the tier. Between one and ten million metered calls, Silver pays 3,50 USD per thousand while Gold and Platinum pay nothing because they are still inside their allowance. Past 75 million, Silver pays 0,35, Gold 0,28 and Platinum 0,25.

Intuit also notes that calls crossing a band are charged at the next band’s rate, so the effective price falls as volume grows rather than jumping.

If the listing is what brought you here, the good news is that no paid tier forces it and no paid tier withholds it. Intuit’s program guide puts it in a heading: “Marketplace listing is optional for Silver, Gold and Platinum Tier partners.” On Builder it is not applicable.

What the upper tiers do require is scale, measured in active connections. An active connection is one QuickBooks Online or Intuit Enterprise Suite company with a live subscription and a valid, unexpired token attached to your app. Gold asks for 500 of them and Platinum for 3.000.

Because those connections are counted across every production app in the same workspace, a vendor with two products reaches the threshold sooner rather than later. That is the opposite of how Xero counts, and it is the kind of detail that quietly decides whether you run one app or several.

Nothing in the programme changes how you build against Maesn. The data model holds, the interface holds, and QuickBooks stays one system among the rest. What the programme changes sits on the other side of the line.

• The app is yours, so the tier is yours. You register it under your own product name and the assessment, the tier and the monthly fee belong to that app. We walk the process with you and we cannot hold it for you.
• Intuit bills you directly. The flat programme fee and any metered overage are charged by Intuit against a payment method you register with them, independently of what you pay Maesn.
• Reducing metered reads is shared work. Which objects you read and how often is your product decision. Making it once instead of once per platform is ours. Xero meters gigabytes where Intuit meters calls, and the cross-vendor view is the accounting integration partnerships guide.
• The categories are Intuit’s, not ours. Whether a given call counts as Core or CorePlus is decided by Intuit’s classification list, and it is worth reading it against your own sync plan rather than guessing from the verb.

What the connection itself involves is on the QuickBooks API page.