/v2/categories endpoint doesn’t list "liabilities"

1

Hi,

I have a freshly-created developer setup, including the sandbox. When I query /v2/categories, I get the following response:

{                                                                                                             
  'admin_expenses_categories': [{                                                                             
      'url': 'https://api.sandbox.freeagent.com/v2/categories/285', 'description': 'Accommodation and Meals', 
      'group_description': 'Admin expenses (normally VATable)', 'nominal_code': '285',                        
      'allowable_for_tax': True, 'tax_reporting_name': 'Travel and subsistence expenses',                     
      'auto_sales_tax_rate': 'Standard rate'                                                                  
  }],                                                                                                         
  'cost_of_sales_categories': [...],                                                                             
  'income_categories': [...],                                                                                    
  'general_categories': [...]                                                                                    
}

I seem to be missing a list called “liabilities_categories”, even though the sandbox has some:

Screenshot_20231104_145116
Screenshot_20231104_1451161524×748 143 KB

Am I missing some URL parameter to include these?

Thanks, Shaheed

2

I noticed that Accounting Categories (chart of accounts) is a similar question.

3

Hello Shaheed - I’m Nikolas and I’m one of the engineers here at FreeAgent.

I believe that “liabilities” categories should be included under the “general_categories” part of the response.I appreciate this can be confusing so I will update the documentation of the endpoint to try and make that clearer.

I understand that it would be handy if the API returned groupings that more closely resemble what’s in sandbox. I have logged your suggestion as a feature request to be reviewed by the relevant product manager.

I hope this helps.

Many thanks,
Nikolas

4

@Nikolas Thanks for the update. FWIW, I’d have no problem with liabilities being in general_categories if there was a way to identify them as liabilities. I believe the other thread on this made a similar request.

As it is, I have resorted to the terrible hack of taking all the account codes listed as “locked” on the liabilities settings page, plus the user-defined range of 731 to 780, and filtering general_categories with the resulting list. Can you kindly confirm that this is a robust approach, or if not, what an alternate approach would be?

5

Hello, thanks for the reply.

We appreciate your feedback. I have added the detail of your request to the feature request.

I can’t officially give advice about workarounds, but I don’t foresee any problems with what you suggest.

Many thanks,
Nikolas

6

@Nikolas Thanks, much appreciated.