Load Zoho Billing data to DuckDB

Zoho Billing is a cloud-based billing and subscription management platform providing a REST API to perform operations such as managing customers, invoices, and subscriptions. Everything needed to build a working Zoho Billing → DuckDB pipeline is on this page: the API's base URL, authentication, endpoints, pagination and incremental field — plus a prompt that hands the whole job to your coding agent.

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Build your Zoho Billing to DuckDB pipeline

Paste this prompt into Claude, Codex, or Cursor. The agent does the rest.

PromptCopy prompt
Run uvx dlthub-init@latest to build a pipeline from Zoho Billing to DuckDB and run it on dltHub

That scaffolds a dltHub workspace and installs the dltHub AI harness — the project rules, the secrets-management skill, and the dlt MCP server your agent needs to work safely. From there it reads the Zoho Billing API, proposes the endpoints to load, then writes, runs and validates the pipeline while you review rather than type. Credentials are inspected through MCP tools, so your agent never reads secrets.toml itself. How the LLM-native workflow works →

Prefer to write it yourself? Every fact the agent uses is below.

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Zoho Billing API at a glance

These values come from the Zoho Billing API reference — the authoritative source if anything here looks out of date.

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How do I authenticate with the Zoho Billing API?

Authentication uses OAuth 2.0 with an access token provided in the Authorization header as 'Authorization: Zoho-oauthtoken '. Additionally, the 'X-com-zoho-subscriptions-organizationid' header is required for all requests to identify the organization.

1. Get your credentials

Zoho Billing uses OAuth 2.0 for API authentication. To obtain credentials: 1. Log in to the Zoho Developer Console (https://api-console.zoho.com). 2. Click 'Add Client ID'. 3. Choose your client type (e.g., 'Self Client' for server-to-server integration). 4. Upon registration, you will receive a Client ID and Client Secret. 5. Use these to generate an authorization code, which you then exchange for an access token via a POST request to https://accounts.zoho.com/oauth/v2/token. You must also obtain your Organization ID by calling the GET /organizations endpoint or checking the 'Manage Organizations' page in your Zoho Billing admin console.

2. Add them to .dlt/secrets.toml

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[sources.zoho_billing_source]
client_id = "your_client_id_here"
client_secret = "your_client_secret_here"
refresh_token = "your_refresh_token_here"
organization_id = "your_organization_id_here"
domain_url = "https://www.zohoapis.com"

dlt reads this file automatically at runtime. With the harness, the setup-secrets skill prompts you for the values and never handles the raw credential in chat. For production, see setting up credentials with dlt.

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What Zoho Billing data can I load into DuckDB?

These are the Zoho Billing endpoints dlt can load into DuckDB:

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How do I load only new Zoho Billing records?

Zoho Billing exposes last_modified_time on customers, so dlt can request only the records that changed since the last run. Set it as the cursor_path and dlt tracks the high-water mark for you between runs.

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{"name": "customers", "endpoint": {
    "path": "customers",
    "data_selector": "page_context",
    "incremental": {"cursor_path": "last_modified_time", "initial_value": "2024-01-01T00:00:00Z"},
}}

On the first run dlt loads everything from initial_value; on every run after that it requests only what changed and appends with write_disposition="merge" if you set a primary key. See incremental loading.

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What does the generated Zoho Billing pipeline look like?

A standard dlt REST API pipeline — the same code you would write by hand, loading organizations and subscriptions from the Zoho Billing API into DuckDB:

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import dlt
from dlt.sources.rest_api import RESTAPIConfig, rest_api_resources

@dlt.source
def zoho_billing_source(access_token=dlt.secrets.value):
    config: RESTAPIConfig = {
        "client": {
            "base_url": "https://www.zohoapis.com/billing/v1",
            "auth": {"type": "api_key", "api_key": access_token, "name": "Authorization", "location": "header"},
        },
        "resources": [
            {"name": "customers", "endpoint": {"path": "customers", "data_selector": "page_context"}},
            {"name": "invoices", "endpoint": {"path": "invoices", "data_selector": "page_context"}}
        ],
    }
    yield from rest_api_resources(config)


def load_zoho_billing_to_duckdb() -> None:
    pipeline = dlt.pipeline(
        pipeline_name="zoho_billing_pipeline",
        destination="duckdb",
        dataset_name="zoho_billing_data",
    )
    load_info = pipeline.run(zoho_billing_source())
    print(load_info)


if __name__ == "__main__":
    load_zoho_billing_to_duckdb()

Run it with python zoho_billing_pipeline.py. The agent iterates on this until it loads cleanly — you review and approve, rather than write it from scratch.

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How do I query Zoho Billing data in DuckDB?

dlt creates one table per resource. Query the loaded data with Python or SQL — or ask your agent to, through the MCP server's execute_sql_query tool.

Python (pandas DataFrame):

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import dlt

data = dlt.pipeline("zoho_billing_pipeline").dataset()
df = data.customers.df()
print(df.head())

SQL:

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SELECT * FROM zoho_billing_data.customers LIMIT 10;

See querying your data with dataset and exploring it in marimo notebooks.

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How do I deploy the Zoho Billing to DuckDB pipeline in production?

The pipeline runs locally, which is ideal for prototyping and one-off analysis. When you need it on a schedule, monitored on every load, and shared with your team, deploy the same dlt code on the dltHub platform — no infrastructure to maintain. The prompt above already ends with "run it on dltHub", so your agent can take it there directly.

• Deploy & schedule — run the pipeline as a managed job with automatic retries.
• Monitor — observable job queues, alerting, and load metrics for every run.
• Transform — promote raw Zoho Billing loads into governed, documented models.
• Visualize & share — explore data in notebooks and publish live dashboards instead of static screenshots.

Book a demo →

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What other destinations can I load Zoho Billing data to?

dlt loads into any of these — only the destination argument changes:

Set dlt.pipeline(destination="snowflake") and add credentials in .dlt/secrets.toml. On the dltHub platform the same pipeline runs against a managed Iceberg lakehouse. See the full destinations list.

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Next steps

• Ready for production? Book a demo of the dltHub platform →
• dlt LLM-native workflow docs
• REST API source reference
• Join the dlt community on Slack