This guide is for tech-savvy backend developers who know how to use an APIAPI A set of rules and protocols that allows different software applications to communicate with each other. Codat provides APIs for accessing financial data from accounting, banking, and commerce platforms.. No frontend experience is needed.
Summary
🎯 Codat makes lending easier by getting you trusted data with which to check a loan applicant’s finances. With our demo app, you will experience the end-to-end lending process flow with automatic decision-making supported by Codat's Lending. We will focus on the lender's perspective.
⏳ Estimated time to complete: 20-30 minutes
🛠️ The demo project is implemented in .NET 7.0 as a backend APIAPI A set of rules and protocols that allows different software applications to communicate with each other. Codat provides APIs for accessing financial data from accounting, banking, and commerce platforms.. You can configure and run the demo app in the terminal, or use your preferred IDE or code editor.
✔️ Delve into the demo app to...
- Create and submit an example loan application form,
- Create a test companyCompany In Codat, a company represents your customer's business entity. Companies can have multiple connections to different data sources. via Codat’s APIAPI A set of rules and protocols that allows different software applications to communicate with each other. Codat provides APIs for accessing financial data from accounting, banking, and commerce platforms. to represent the borrower,
- LinkLink The authorization flow that allows end users to connect their accounting, banking, or commerce platforms to your application via Codat. the test companyCompany In Codat, a company represents your customer's business entity. Companies can have multiple connections to different data sources. to Codat's sandbox source of financial data,
- Fetch that data using Codat’s Enhanced Profit and Loss and Enhanced Balance Sheet endpoints,
- Use Codat’s webhooksWebhook An automated notification sent from Codat to your application when specific events occur, such as when data syncs complete or connections change status. to trigger the lending of a loan,
- Produce an automated lending decision based on custom financial data points.
❌ This guide does not cover...
- Building any application form and dashboard UIs.
- Details or recommendations of various financial data points used in different lending models.
- Details on how to perform loan writeback for general lending (see also: Recording general loan payments).
About the demo app
The app's codebase is available via our GitHub repo. Clone it locally to try out the application.
The codebase uses Codat and its Lending solution to make a lending decision. We will walk you through the setup in the Portal and the code next.
Why we use Lending
The demo app makes use of the categorization feature of Lending. This feature analyses the full list of a companyCompany In Codat, a company represents your customer's business entity. Companies can have multiple connections to different data sources.'s accounts and assigns a category to each account. This solves the problem of bookkeepers giving different names to the same accounting category.
For example, one bookkeeper may name their marketing account "Facebook Ads", and another may call it "Online Marketing". Lending will categorize both accounts in the same way - as Expense > Operating > Marketing. This enables lenders to use a standardized taxonomy, no matter how the bookkeeper manages their accounts.
This standardizes the data irrespective of its source and helps you make a comprehensive assessment of your customer's financial health, produce additional insights (e.g. calculate financial ratios), and automate decisioning based on these insights.
Read next
Now that you know the focus and purpose of our demo app and its guide: