Customers in QuickBooks Online

A customer is an individual or business who buys products and services (i.e items) from a business.

Users add customers into QuickBooks Online so they can quickly associate them with invoices, sales receipts, and other sales forms.

Learn more about how QuickBooks Online users add and manage customers.

How this relates to app development

Your app needs to be able to link customers to specific transactions such as invoices, sales receipts, and refunds. These require customer data so QuickBooks knows who to associate the info with.

Tip: The individuals and businesses who sell items to a business are known as vendors. It’s quite common for a vendor to also be a customer.

Design your app so it can track your end-user’s existing customers and vendors.

Use the Customer entity to create and query customer data.
Use the Vendor entity to create and query vendor data.

Customers and vendors may already exist in a user’s QuickBooks Online company. It’s important to look them up before creating a new object to avoid errors.

Tip: Our APIs always refer to customers as “customers” vendors as “vendors.” But keep in mind, QuickBooks Online users can customize and rename individuals based on their preference. You can check the AccountingInfoPrefs.CustomerTerminology attribute of the Preferences endpoint to see how users define their “customers” or “vendors,”