To get started, sign up for a free account here. After registration, you will have access to your OAuth application client_id and client_secret to build and test how Chart works.

This client_id and client_secret will only work for the TurboTax provider and only for a limited number of submissions. If you would like to test all the providers with unrestricted submissions, please contact developers@trychartapi.com.

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Open Chart Connect

Chart Connect provides a secure and elegant authorization flow for your users to grant your application access to their tax records.

Note: this quickstart guide is a simplified, but manual way of generating an authorization code and exchanging it for an access_token, which can be used to subsequently call our APIs. In a true production environment, you will want to automate this process completely inside your application’s code.

Since this quickstart assumes you have not built an application yet, we must make sure that a proper redirect_uri is set up before continuing or our authorization code generation will fail. In your Chart Dashboard, go to the “Redirect URIs” section and select + Add Redirect URI. We are going to use https://example.com for testing purposes. In production, you will want to use your own application’s urls for the Redirect Uris (and remove all mentions of https://example.com or http://localhost).

Redirect URIs are only needed if you are redirecting to Chart Connect. If you decide to use our embedded Chart Connect flow, you do not need to specify a redirect_uri; the SDK does this for you.

We will launch Chart Connect - our secure and elegant authorization flow for your users to grant your application access to their systems - by constructing and navigating to the following URL on your browser. Copy the url below, open up your favorite text editor (Notes, TextEdit, VS Code, etc), paste, and replace <your_client_id> with the client id found in your Chart Dashboard. Remove the angle brackets when replacing <your_client_id>.

https://connect.trychartapi.com?
client_id=<your_client_id>
&redirect_uri=https://example.com

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Log in to a TurboTax account

Select the TurboTax provider on the selector page and log in with real Intuit credentials.

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Exchange the authorization code for an access token

After successfully logging in via Chart Connect, your browser will be redirected to https://example.com with the query parameter code in the browser URL. Copy the code from the url and save it in your text editor. In a production system, however, the browser will redirect to your url and your application will automatically copy the code and perform the remaining steps programmatically.

To exchange the code for a token, we use the curl command below. Copy the code below, paste into your text editor, replace the <your_authorization_code> in the command with the one you saved above (making sure to not include the angle brackets).

curl https://api.trychartapi.com/auth/token \
-X POST \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
--data-raw '{
    "client_id": "<your_client_id>",
    "client_secret": "<your_client_secret>",
    "code": "<your_authorization_code>",
    "redirect_uri": "https://example.com"
}'

Congratulations!

You have sent your first request to Chart’s API. The next step is to integrate Chart Connect onto your application.

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