How to find who you are with Accountancy Practice API

1

Hello!

If my user authorises my “company” application to connect to FreeAgent, I can find out who they are like this:

GET https://api.freeagent.com/v2/users/me

However if my users authorises my practice-enabled application to connect to FreeAgent, how do I find out who they are?

As far as I can tell, all I can do is get the list of the practice’s account managers but there’s no indication which one the user is.

Would it be possible to support something like:

GET https://api.freeagent.com/v2/account_managers/me

Many thanks,

Andrew Stewart

2

Hello Andrew!

Thanks as always for your thoughtful posts. I can confirm that we don’t currently offer a way for an application to get the details of the currently active account manager. To help me raise a feature request for this, are you comfortable sharing what you’d do with these details? In other words: what problem are you trying to solve?

If you’d rather share privately, you can message me directly on this forum.

Thanks again,

James Bell

–
Engineering Manager
FreeAgent

3

Hello James!

Thanks for picking this up :slight_smile:

To sign up to my app, a new company user goes through the oAuth process to allow my app to talk to their FreeAgent account. Once they have approved my app, I can call /users/me to find out their name and email etc, and then I can create a user record in my own system with their name and email etc. So I never need to ask them to type in their name and email address.

When an accountant signs up, they go through the same oAuth process but at the end I only know their practice and its managers, not who they actually are. So when I create a user record in my own system I don’t know what name or email to give it. I then have to show the user a list of managers and ask them to choose themself, which is a slightly weird user experience :wink:

To summarise, I need to know a user’s name so the UI can display it on their profile and I need the user’s email address for transactional emails such as password-resets. I would like the user not to have to type in their own details. The problem I have is that I can’t do this behind the scenes for an accountant; I have to ask them to tell me who they are first. It’s not a big deal but it would be nice to streamline.

Thank you!
Andrew

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4

Thanks Andrew,

For me you’ve clearly articulated your need. I’ll raise it as a feature request, and should we implement it, we’ll let you know!

James

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