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Octobat is a tax compliance and billing-as-a-service provider, designed to help companies in building an automatic billing flow, including collecting money easily, solving global tax issues and delivering tax receipts and invoices to customers.
In this section, you'll learn some basics about how to use Octobat and find resources that can help you as you integrate it.

Before You Start

Octobat's automated flow can be plugged directly on your app, or relies on a payment platform direct integration.
To be able to automate tax calculation and to produce worldwide compliant invoices, Octobat requires you to send particular data to its API, or to your payment provider. There are two ways to deal with this, the simplest one is to rely on our built-in forms, that replace your PSP API calls and don't require you to code a backend to collect money. The second one, more relevant if you have particular needs, is to handle your PSP API calls on your own, and customize them in an Octobat-compliant way.

Create your account

To use Octobat built-in components or integrations, you are required to create an account first. br When subscribing, Octobat will ask you to accept our terms of service, and will create a private workspace to secure your data.
To link a payment platform to your Octobat account, we require read/write access to your PSP account to be able to fetch the required data to compute tax calculations and generate/send the tax receipts and invoices. br Write access will never be used to create/alter/delete data. When using Octobat built-in forms, you consent us to perform the required PSP API calls to create the charges and subscriptions you need to collect money.

Obtain your API keys

When not using a direct integration, you must use an appropriate API key to fetch/create/update a resource managed by Octobat.
API keys are available for both livemode and testmode with exactly the same purpose. We strongly advise you to use testmode keys while developing your app, so when switching to production, you'll only have to change each API key to the corresponding livemode one.
Secret and publishable keys are the two ways used to identify your Octobat account. The publishable key is used to create charge and subscriptions when using Octobat built-in and custom forms and should be included with the HTML form. The secret key is used for all other API calls on the server-side. The secret key should never be visible by a visitor.
You can grab your test and live API keys under the API Keys section.

Integrate Octobat

There are two ways to implement Octobat in your app/website. You can use our PSP direct integrations, or rely on your own API implementation.
  • Octobat direct integrations are the easiest and fastest ways to automate your tax compliance and billing flows. Just connect your favorite payment platform, and benefit from Octobat's automation expertise to generate invoices and tax receipts without any effort.
  • If you have particular needs, or we don't support the PSP you use yet, you still can have access to Octobat's billing, tax calculation and reporting features. Thanks to our RESTful API, build your own flow, manage your tax issues, generate invoices on-the-go, and give your accountant what he/she needs.

Need help?

We’re always happy to help out with code or any other questions you might have. Please drop us a line to [email protected]
Last modified 3yr ago