Skip to main content

​
Prerequisites

Before onboarding a business, you will need:
  • An active Layer account and API credentials
  • A valid access token (see Initial Setup)
  • Your customer’s basic business information (legal name, entity type, state)

​
Overview

The first step is to onboard your customer to Layer using the Create a Business endpoint. This creates a record for your customer in Layer’s systems and provisions their general ledger.
1

Prepare business information

Gather the information about your customer’s business. We recommend providing as much information as possible to help Layer accurately classify transactions and provide a better experience for your customer:
  • legal_name - The business’s legal name
  • entity_type - One of: SOLE_PROP, C_CORP, LLC, S_CORP, PARTNERSHIP
  • us_state - Two letter state code
  • external_id - Your internal ID for this business, useful for linking records
  • phone_number - Used for SMS-based transaction categorization
  • unit_accounts - Array of Unit account IDs to link
  • plaid_items - Array of Plaid items to connect (requires Plaid configuration)
The external_id field allows you to link the Layer business record to your own internal customer ID, making it easier to associate data between systems.
2

Create the business

Make a POST request to the Create a Business endpoint with the business information. See the full endpoint documentation for request examples and all available parameters.
If you’ve configured Plaid credentials (see Plaid Configuration), you can link Plaid accounts during business creation by including the plaid_items field.
3

Save the business ID

The API responds with the created Business object. Save the id field - you’ll use this to make API calls on behalf of this business.

​
Next Steps

After onboarding a business, you can: