The export guarantee

Your books are yours.
Take them any time.

One button in Settings gives you a complete, standard-format copy of everything — no fee, no ticket, no new terms to accept. This page says exactly what is in it, so you can hold us to it.

Why this page exists

In December 2024, 12,000 businesses lost their books overnight.

Bench Accounting shut down two days after Christmas with no notice. Its export had no general ledger and no format QuickBooks or Xero could read. The company that bought it then told customers to accept new terms or “not get that data at all.” The question every founder and every accountant now asks — what happens to my books if you fail? — deserves an answer you can verify, not a reassurance.

What the export contains

Every file is a plain CSV. An accountant with no Ledgers account can use all of it.

The books

General ledger — every committed journal line: date, account, debit, credit
Trial balance — derived from the same lines, and it must balance to the penny or the export is refused
Chart of accounts, journal entries and raw journal lines
Accounting periods, with sign-offs

Everything behind them

Every bank transaction and how it was categorised
Contacts, invoices and their lines, bills and their lines
Fixed assets and bank accounts
Every document, with the SHA-256 of the file, so a copy can be proven identical
books.json — all of the above, machine-readable

The three promises

Complete. Standard. Verifiable.

Complete, or nothing

Every table is read to the last row. If a single read fails, the export fails — you get a plain message, never a smaller file that looks whole. The manifest’s complete: true is computed from what was actually read, not set by us.

Standard formats

CSV throughout, with debits and credits in separate columns the way every ledger package imports them. To move to Xero, QuickBooks or Sage: import the chart, post the trial balance as opening balances, keep the general ledger as your audit trail.

Verifiable

manifest.json carries a SHA-256 for every file in the archive and the trial-balance totals. Recompute them in five years with no Ledgers account and prove nothing has changed.

In the file itself

Your books are yours. You can take a complete, standard-format copy of them at any time, without asking, without a fee, and without agreeing to anything new. This export contains every committed journal line, the full chart of accounts, a trial balance, every transaction, contact, invoice, bill and fixed asset, and a hash-verified list of every document. If Ledgers ever stopped operating, this file is everything an accountant needs to carry on in any other system.

This text ships inside every export, in README.txt and manifest.json. It is the same constant that renders this page, so the promise on the website and the promise in your file cannot drift apart.

What we do not promise

Honest limits.

Document files are listed and hashed, not bundled. An organisation can hold gigabytes of receipts. Each is available from the Documents page; the export gives you the hash to prove any copy is the original.
Only committed entries are in the ledger files. Drafts and proposals the agent has not yet posted are not your books, and are not presented as such.
Every member of your organisation can export. It is their data too, and a guarantee that only the owner can exercise is weaker than one anyone on the team can. Who is a member is under your control in Settings → Members, and every export is written to the audit log with who took it and when.

Your books are yours.Take them any time.