---
updatedAt: 2026-10-08T17:01:47.000Z
agentTools:
  projectIndex: https://developer.unimaze.com/llms.txt
---

# Getting started

Start here: what MAPI is, how the documentation is organized, and the steps from a sandbox account to your first message.

<Callout icon="📘" theme="info">
  **Welcome to the Unimaze developer documentation** :owlbert:

  **MAPI** is the Unimaze API for exchanging electronic business documents with your business partners.
  A supplier can send an invoice to a customer, a customer can send an order to a supplier or receive the invoices sent to them, all over the networks Unimaze connects to (such as Peppol and national e-invoicing and tax networks).

  You don't need to be an e-invoicing expert to use the API: in most cases you send structured JSON, and Unimaze handles lookups, formats and delivery.
</Callout>

## Your path through the documentation

| Step | Read                                                                                                     | You'll know                                                            |
| :--- | :------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | :--------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| 1    | **Getting started** (this section)                                                                       | How to authenticate and generate a client for your language            |
| 2    | [Integration patterns](/docs/choosing-an-integration-pattern)                                            | How your system stays in sync with Unimaze: webhooks, SP2SP or polling |
| 3    | [Guides](/docs/quickstart)                                                                               | How to send messages, receive inbound messages and view documents      |
| 4    | Guided tours: [Transaction Services](/docs/mapi-txs-guide) or [Messaging Services](/docs/mapi-msg-guide) | A complete send-and-receive flow, step by step                         |
| 5    | Country networks (Croatia, Serbia, Slovakia)                                                             | Local requirements, such as tax reporting                              |

Look up terms in **Concepts** when you need them, for example [participant identifiers](/docs/business-participant-identifiers) or [MLRs and eMLRs](/docs/working-with-mlrs-emlrs-and-mlas). You don't have to read that section first.

## First steps

1. **Get sandbox access.** Contact Unimaze to get a sandbox account. When you're signed in to developer.unimaze.com, your sandbox API keys are filled in automatically in the API reference, so you can use **Try it** right away.
2. **Authenticate.** Requests are authenticated with a **Bearer API key** in the `Authorization` header. Legacy HTTP Basic authentication is still supported.
3. **Generate a client.** Use the OpenAPI definitions below to generate a client in .NET, Java, Python or TypeScript, see [API integration](/docs/api-integration).
4. **Choose an integration pattern.** Decide how your system will learn about new inbound documents and status changes, see [Choosing an integration pattern](/docs/choosing-an-integration-pattern). For new integrations we recommend [webhooks](/docs/webhooks).
5. **Send your first invoice.** Follow the [Transaction Services guided tour](/docs/mapi-txs-guide) to send an invoice created from JSON metadata to another sandbox participant, then receive it on the other side.

## Which API should I use?

| API area                 | Use it for                                                                                                                        |
| :----------------------- | :-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| **Messaging Services**   | Sending and receiving **native XML** (for example UBL) or raw documents, when you already produce or consume compliant documents. |
| **Transaction Services** | Sending and receiving business documents as **JSON metadata**. Unimaze creates the correct format for each receiver.              |
| **Partner Services**     | Partners and ERP vendors managing their customers' subscriptions and participants.                                                |

See [Sending messages](/docs/quickstart) for a comparison of JSON metadata, native XML and raw documents.

## OpenAPI specifications (sandbox)

Use these **OpenAPI definitions** when generating clients:

```Text MAPI
https://mapi-sandbox.unimaze.com/swagger/v1/swagger.json
```
```Text QAPI
https://qapi-sandbox.unimaze.com/swagger/v1/swagger.json
```

<DownloadOASButton text="Download MAPI (OpenAPI specification)" url="https://mapi-sandbox.unimaze.com/swagger/v1/swagger.json" />

<DownloadOASButton text="Download QAPI (OpenAPI specification)" url="https://qapi-sandbox.unimaze.com/swagger/v1/swagger.json" />

<br />

For further information, contact us at info \[at] unimaze \[dot] com.