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How to Add Intuit Customer Account Data (CAD)

By Christopher Britz /
on node, intuit-cad, intuit, CAD, javascript

image-post mask If you ever had the need to use Intuit's Customer Account Data(CAD) and are using NodeJS we have definitely been in the same boat together. The boat where there is about ten anchors holding you back because Intuit does not have a module for NodeJS yet to help you. Sound familiar? If so, look no further, as I implemented their CAD API with JavaScript and put it in a NPM module called intuit-cad. This allows you to effortlessly authenticate your customers and get access to their institution's data such as transactions and accounts.

Git Repository:

intuit-cad

Prerequisites:

There are a couple of preliminary steps that must be done in order to use Intuit's CAD in general, but this is mandatory with or without the use of the intuit-cad library. The pre req's are:

  1. Sign up for intuit developer's account, Directions are here:
    Getting Started with Intuit CAD

    • The Getting started will guide you through creating and setting up your private and public ssl keys, which are needed for authentication when calling the API ReST endpoints.
    • Only follow up to and including step 3 because my module takes care of steps 4 and 5 for you, which are the hardest.

  2. Obtain your credentials for using Intuit's API they are:

    • Oauth Consumer Key
    • Oauth Consumer Secret
    • SAML Provider Id

All of the above information is given to you by Intuit when you uploaded your .crt file. They can be found when you are within the application you created. Below is an image of what they would look like:

intuit app

Once you have all that jazz you are ready to go. Just follow the ReadMe within my repository and it will guide you on how to authenticate and make API calls to Intuit's CAD API.

What this Module Does for You

This module in a nutshell performs the following steps:

  1. Builds up the SAML Assertion
    • the SAML assertions will be signed using your private key and passphrase
    • this was by far the hardest hurdle to jump, as the CAD documentation was incorrect and sub par.
  2. Performs the OAuth signing and request - was simple with request module
  3. Returns the Data you requested - just like that

The only part that is on you is to obtain your SAML OAuth keys from Intuit, as described above. (I wish I could do this for you, unfortunately I can't).

If you have any questions or comments please either open a new issue ticket here: intuit-cad/issues(recommended), or add a comment here.

Hope this helps some people. Please let me know if I can make any improvments/fixes to my library.