how to save data from an old QB Online account before closing

You can convert your data to QB Desktop before cancelling your QBO account and use the trial version to access your historical data for good.

I appreciate you for sharing your concern with us, mkfthompson. Allow me to elaborate on the process of saving your QuickBooks Online (QBO) data properly.

Since you're using the QBO data for future reference, I suggest manually exporting your data to make a backup copy of your first QBO company. Here's how:

1. Go to Settings and select Export data.
2. On the Reports tab, set the date range.
3. Add or remove items from the Reports and Lists tabs by turning the switch on or off.
4. Click Export to Excel.

Check out this article for more information about this process: Export reports, lists, and other data from QuickBooks Online. You may also utilize a third-party application for a smooth procedure of downloading your QBO data.

Furthermore, please note that the QBO program doesn't have the option to archive an account, you can proceed cancelling it since you don't need to utilize it. Just keep in mind that if you have one QBO account and cancel it, you have read-only access to your data for one year. After that, you have to resubscribe to access the data.

On the other hand, if you have multiple QBO accounts with the same login, ensure that at least one account remains active to have read-only access indefinitely. Visit this article for detailed steps in canceling an account: Cancel your QuickBooks Online subscription or trial.

Additionally, you can explore this article to gain insights about your QBO data after ending your subscription: What happens to my QuickBooks Online data after I cancel?

I'm always around to share appropriate information if you have further inquiries about managing your QBO data. Please notify me by clicking the Reply button below or post a new thread again.

Hi @mkfthompson,

Hope you’re doing great. I wanted to see how everything is going about saving the old QuickBooks Online company data concern you had the other day. Was it resolved? Do you need any additional help or clarification? If you do, just let me know. I’d be happy to help you at any time.

Looking forward to your reply. Have a pleasant day ahead!

Disclosure up front: I build archival software for accounting data commercially, so weigh what follows accordingly. Everything below uses only free tools and doesn't require anything from me.

The advice to convert to Desktop and read the archive with a trial license is worth thinking twice about. It preserves a file you can only open with a matching QuickBooks install, and that install needs activation against Intuit's servers. Trial licenses expire. Desktop itself is being wound down. And .QBW files upgrade irreversibly when opened in a newer version, so "keep the file" quietly means "keep the file AND a frozen install AND a machine that runs it." That's a plan with three moving parts that all have to survive seven years, and no way to test whether it worked until the day you need it.

The clock that matters: after you cancel, you get read-only access for one year, then the account is deleted. So whatever you're going to pull, pull it while the account is still live.

What I'd actually export, in this order:

1. Reports, for the full date range, one file per year — General Ledger, Transaction Detail by Account, Trial Balance, Profit & Loss, Balance Sheet, and A/R and A/P aging as of your final date. Export each one twice: PDF for the human-readable copy an auditor can open with no software, and Excel/CSV for anything you'll need to search.

2. Lists — chart of accounts, customers, vendors, employees, products/services. These are what make the transaction exports interpretable later.

3. Attachments. This is the one people miss. Receipts and documents you've attached to transactions are not in any report export and don't come across in a Desktop conversion. If you have years of receipt images in there, they have to be pulled separately, and they're usually the thing an examiner actually asks for.

The piece that makes it useful later: a folder of spreadsheets technically satisfies retention but is miserable to query. The question you'll actually get is "what did we pay this vendor the week of X, five years ago" — and answering that from a stack of exports means opening files until you find it. If you can get the CSVs into anything queryable (SQLite is free, and Excel with a proper table works for smaller files), that same question becomes one filter instead of an afternoon.

One extra step worth the ten minutes, if these records might ever be looked at by someone who isn't you — a buyer, an examiner, the other side of a dispute:

  sha256sum *.csv *.pdf > manifest.txt

Then get an RFC 3161 timestamp on that manifest from a time stamp authority (freetsa.org is free; DigiCert and GlobalSign do it commercially). That produces a signed token proving the files existed in exactly that form on that date, verifiable by anyone later with openssl and no dependence on you or on the service still existing. It doesn't prove your books are correct — nothing does — but it proves nothing was altered after the fact, which is the question that comes up when records are challenged.

On the multiple-accounts trick: keeping one account active to preserve read-only access on the others does work, but it's an indefinite subscription against a policy Intuit can change. Worth knowing it's a subscription, not an archive.

Happy to answer questions about any of the export or verification steps.