Quickbooks API: Instructions for enabling item categories

Sharing here since I’m not sure how to post an answer to an unasked question on the Intuit site.

tl;dr

To enable item categories in dev, when logged in to a sandbox company, go to https://sandbox.qbo.intuit.com/app/categorymigration, and click ‘Switch to Categories’.

Details

This is a new developer account using the OAuth 2.0 API (Quickbooks v3).

I was unable to turn on categories in the sandbox by updating companyinfo or any obvious page in the web UI.

In production, I noticed that the URL for the categories page was /app/category, so I went to https://sandbox.qbo.intuit.com/app/categories, and it redirected to https://sandbox.qbo.intuit.com/app/categorymigration I saw and clicked the link to ‘Switch to Categories’. I was then able to go to /app/categories in the web UI to create categories, as well as create them via the API.

FWIW, It appears the migration posted a CORS request to https://sandbox.qbo.intuit.com/qbo50/neo/v1/company/12345/companysetup/enableCategories. This is probably using the new, unreleased, API.

e.g.

post /item, payload: { Name: 'Transportation', Type: 'Category' }, params: { minorversion: 4}

Before the enablecategories migration, the API returned I got a 400

[{:fault_type=>"ValidationFault", :error_code=>"500", :error_message=>"Unsupported Operation", :error_detail=>"Operation CREATE CATEGORY is not supported."}]

afterwards

{"Name"=>"Flowers", "Active"=>true, "FullyQualifiedName"=>"Transportation", "Type"=>"Category", "domain"=>"QBO", "sparse"=>false, "Id"=>"36", "SyncToken"=>"0", "MetaData"=>{"CreateTime"=>"2017-11-08T08:58:38-08:00", "LastUpdatedTime"=>"2017-11-08T08:58:38-08:00"}}

Not a bug: Category of Type: Service

Weird note: a subsequent query returned with Type: Service instead of Type: Category.

(Quickbooks support suggested I use a minor version 12 or greater, but I didn’t go through the trouble to create a new company to check that)

{"Name"=>"Transportation", "Active"=>true, "FullyQualifiedName"=>"Transportation", "Type"=>"Service", "domain"=>"QBO", "sparse"=>false, "Id"=>"36", "SyncToken"=>"0", "MetaData"=>{"CreateTime"=>"2017-11-08T13:28:16-08:00", "LastUpdatedTime"=>"2017-11-08T13:31:39-08:00"}

but I was still able to use it as a super category,

e.g.

 { "Name"=>"Hour", "Active"=>true, "SubItem"=>true, "ParentRef"=>{"value"=>"36", "name"=>"Transportation"}, "Level"=>1, "FullyQualifiedName"=>"Transportation:Hour", "Type"=>"Service", "domain"=>"QBO", "sparse"=>false, "Id"=>"37", "SyncToken"=>"0", "MetaData"=>{"CreateTime"=>"2017-11-08T13:31:18-08:00", "LastUpdatedTime"=>"2017-11-08T13:31:18-08:00"}}