Overview
The Business Pilot Open API allows external systems to read from and write to a Business Pilot account programmatically. This includes reporting and BI tools, website lead capture, automation platforms such as Zapier, or a bespoke integration built by your own development team.
API documentation v1.1 is now live, and is hosted at:
open-api.businesspilot.co.uk/scalar
This replaces the Swagger-hosted v1.0 documentation. v1.1 is a cleaner reference with increased guidance on each endpoint, and it exposes a number of endpoints that were not previously documented. It is the supported version going forward, all future additions will be made here only.
What the documentation covers
- Over 100 endpoints across 37 areas of the platform: leads and contacts, contracts, quotes, appointments, invoices, purchase orders, job costs, service calls, suppliers and more, including webhook subscriptions.
- Guidance on the purpose of each endpoint and when to use it, rather than a bare schema definition.
- Request and response structures, required fields and expected formats.
- Ready-made code samples in Shell, Ruby, Node.js, PHP, Python and others, generated per endpoint.
- A downloadable OpenAPI document, if you would rather generate a client or import the spec into your own tooling.
If you are handing this to a developer or a third-party integrator, the link above is all they need.
Authentication
Every request must be authenticated with an API Key, sent as an X-Api-Key request header.
Your key is generated against your individual Business Pilot user account. To find it, go to the user icon (top right) → Manage Settings → User API Credentials, where it can be copied directly. Your User ID is displayed alongside it on the same screen.
Every request then carries the key as a header:
X-Api-Key: d7e2b910-4a63-4c85-b1f7-3e0a56c8d224
(Sample value only — substitute your own key.)
Permissions follow the user account the credentials belong to, so the API can only do what that user can do. Treat the API Key as a credential in its own right: do not share it externally, embed it in client-side code, or include it in support tickets.
Migrating from v1.0
Your existing API Key carries over. It authenticates against v1.1 exactly as it does today, there is nothing to regenerate and no re-authorisation step. Migration is limited to the requests themselves:
- Update the base URL. Requests currently sent to api-zapier.businesspilot.co.uk should be pointed at open-api.businesspilot.co.uk.
- Check endpoint and field naming. Some endpoints, parameters and labels have been renamed for consistency in v1.1. No functionality has been removed, but references your integration relies on may have changed. Validate your existing calls against the v1.1 documentation before switching over.
We would recommend testing against a non-live environment and migrating one integration at a time.
Support Timeline
The v1.0 Swagger documentation at api-zapier.businesspilot.co.uk remains available until the end of 2026, after which it will be retired. Existing v1.0 integrations will continue to function until then, but will receive no further additions, any new capability will be documented in v1.1 only.
For assistance with migration or integration planning, contact the Business Pilot support team.