Developers

Test business

A Test business is a Business of your own for trying an integration. Everything works in it as in any Business — the Public API, OAuth apps, AI assistants and Webhooks — but its documents are marked as samples and nothing it sends reaches a Client. When you are done, reset it and run your tests again.

Creating one

Sign in to Essentio, open the menu that names your current business and choose Create Test Business. Essentio creates it and switches to it at once; the menu and My Businesses call it a Test business. You are its Owner.

  • One per person. While you own a Test business, the menu does not offer another, and a second is refused with “You already have a Test business: reset it to start again.” Being a member of someone else’s Test business does not count.
  • A Test business stays one. Nothing turns an ordinary Business into a Test business, or a Test business into an ordinary one: build your integration on the Test business, then create an API key in the real one.
  • Set it up as you would a real Business — its VAT rates, bank accounts and, if it should send from a mailbox of its own rather than through Essentio, a mail provider under Settings → Email — and create an API key in its Settings, or connect your OAuth app or AI assistant to it on the consent screen.

What is different

  • Its documents are samples. Every PDF it makes — documents, Receipts and Statements, downloaded, printed or attached to an email — has SAMPLE across each page, and its documents’ pages in Essentio and their public pages carry a Sample mark. The API says so: the Business setup and every document carry is_test: true.
  • Its numbers carry TEST-. Every number it takes — the next one of each type, a Receipt’s, one you type for a Draft and a correction — has TEST- in front of what its number pattern makes, such as TEST-INV-2026-0007. A number typed with TEST- already is not given it twice. The patterns in its Settings are unchanged.
  • It keeps no real books. It exports nothing an accountant books from: the EN16931 XML — in Essentio and through the API, refused exports_not_in_a_test_business — the eSoft files, the Proformas analysis, the Clients exports and the Business Archive. Each document’s PDF stays.
  • It issues as many Invoices a year as the Free plan. It meets the Free plan’s Issuing limit: past it, Issue and Send are refused issuing_limit_reached — “A Test business issues up to 200 documents a year. Reset it to start again.”, with no remedy — and a reset deletes its documents, so it issues again.
  • Its old numbers carry TEST- too. The numbers a Test business took before TEST- was added were given it, so a number it already had is refused as taken if you type it again.
  • Everything it emails reaches you alone. A document it sends — through the API, an assistant or its own Send button — is delivered to its Owner’s email address, never to the Client, and with no copies to anyone else. The Client still needs an email address on record, as in any Business, or the Send is refused with no_client_address.
  • Its Webhooks are delivered as any Business’s are, to the addresses you gave them — your own program’s, never a Client’s.
  • It keeps the Public API and Webhooks on every plan, which a Business on the Free plan does not have: you can try them before paying.

Everything else is the same: the same errors, the same rate limit, the same request log.

Resetting it

The Owner resets a Test business in Essentio under Settings → General → Reset Test Business. A reset erases what the Business did and keeps how it is set up:

  • Erased: its documents, Clients, Products, Payments and Receipts, the answers kept for Idempotency-Keys, the request log and its Webhook deliveries. Every numbering — each document type’s, the Receipts’ and the Clients’ account codes — starts again at 1.
  • Kept: its team and pending invitations, VAT rates, bank accounts, templates, settings and images, API keys, Connected apps and Webhooks with their secrets — so your integration keeps calling and listening after a reset, with nothing to change.

Only a Test business can be reset; an ordinary Business answers that it cannot.