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WiseCost API overview

The WiseCost API is a read-only REST API for time activities, catalogs and posted labor journal lines, built for data warehouses, BI tools and reconciliation.

For AdminsLast updated

The WiseCost API is a read-only REST API over your company's data. Use it to take your time data to a data warehouse or a BI tool, or to reconcile WiseCost against another system. It reads time activities, catalogs such as employees, classes and projects, and the journal lines posted by Labor Distribution. It never exposes compensation data.

Who this is for: Administrators, and the developers, data teams or integrators they work with.

Endpoints, parameters, response examples and the sync guide live in the interactive API reference, which is generated from the code.

Open the API reference

What you can read

  • Time activities, with a feed of deletions, so you can keep an incremental copy in sync without downloading everything again.
  • Catalogs: employees, classes, projects, items, locations, timesheets and payroll periods.
  • Labor distribution: the journal lines that Labor Distribution posted.

Typical uses

  • Load hours into a data warehouse and join them with your other data.
  • Build dashboards in a BI tool: hours by contract, by award, by person.
  • Reconcile WiseCost against a project management, billing or grants system.

Things to know before you build

  • Read-only. The API does not create or change anything in WiseCost.
  • No compensation data. Salaries and pay rates are not exposed.
  • Rate limit. Each key has a limit of requests per minute.
  • Pagination by cursor. Lists are paged with a cursor, not with page numbers.
  • Scopes. Each key can read only what its scopes allow: time_activities:read, catalog:read and labor_distribution:read.

Everything else, including a sync guide for integrators, is in the API reference. The OpenAPI specification is at app.usewisecost.com/api/v1/openapi.json.

Get started

  1. An admin creates a key. See Creating and managing API keys.
  2. Your developer opens the API reference and makes the first request with that key.

For a one-time file instead of an integration, export CSV from Time Activities.

Common questions

How do I export WiseCost time data to my own database?

Create an API key with the time_activities:read scope and read the time activities endpoint incrementally, using the deletions feed to stay in sync. The sync guide in the API reference has the details.

Can the API write time entries?

No. It is read-only.

Does the API expose salaries or pay rates?

No. Compensation data is not available through the API.