Linda Artesani shows how to cancel QuickBooks Online and protect your data. Export your company file before the subscription ends, either as a QuickBooks Desktop file or Excel spreadsheets, and save it to encrypted cloud storage. You'll have read-only access for up to a year after cancellation, but permanent access ends once that period expires.
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Hi there, Linda Artesani, Artesani Bookkeeping. I'm going to do a little video on how to cancel your QuickBooks Online subscription, and this is for the USA version only, and talk a little bit about what happens when you cancel and what you should do for best practices to make sure that you've got your data in place. Because obviously, once your file is done with QuickBooks Online and they close it out completely after a year, you don't have any access to anything. So you have to make sure you've got some good practices in place so that you have your data in case you get an audit or, you know, anything like that. So I'm going to take you to a file and take you just through the steps on how to cancel. So we're going to come over to the gear off the dashboard page. We're going to come over to Account and Settings. I'm going to come over to the tab that says Billing and Subscriptions. And in here you can see where you can hit the word Cancel. So it's that simple. So let's go to the file and go over the best practices. So a few things you should know before you really click the button and cancel your file is that you have the option to downgrade. So if you're going to, if you're going to do a complete cancellation because of the pricing, which I know that we just had a price increase, recent one, you are able to downgrade your file. Again, this is for the US only. But a couple of ways to make sure your data is safe after you've canceled. Obviously, when you cancel, you have read-only access for an entire year. So you'll still be able to log into QuickBooks. You won't be able to change any of the settings or do anything to transactions, but your data would be there for a full year. So those are— that's important to know. That you would still have access. You won't be able to do anything with it, but you'll have access. One of the things I recommend is exporting your file. Now, you can export it to Excel, especially if you don't have QuickBooks Desktop. It's probably a good idea to do so. If you have somebody that you work with that does have ability to export to QuickBooks Desktop, I recommend that because you'll always be able to get a copy of QuickBooks Desktop and then restore it so you'd have access to it again. But we'll just go to first exporting the file. So let's go over to the gear, and as you can see, export the data. You need to have Microsoft Explorer to do this and Internet Explorer, and it's important you're not using Edge. You can't use Edge. Obviously, I'm on a Mac here. You can't use a Mac. I would have to go to my PC to do it. And it's a few steps involved in doing this particular task. It's quite lengthy. I will provide you a link in the blog post on how to do it with the steps and the pictures. The most important thing— it's actually not that difficult to export a file, but you have to know what you're doing in the desktop file because there's a couple of clicks you have to do to make sure that it continues on. Sometimes it feels like it's hanging, and depending on the file size, it may actually hang. But you'll be able to get that out. And if it doesn't export out completely, you can always call support, or better to reach out to a ProAdvisor who has a higher level of support that can help you more easily than going to support directly on your own. Exporting to Excel, that's an option. That's a really good option, and I would do it by fiscal year. So I would print out all my financial statements by fiscal year, and I'd also print out the complete general ledger. So that's where I would start. Depending on how you file your tax return, whether it's a cash basis or it's a— if it's a cash basis, you want to run your reports on cash basis. If it's full cert, if you're accrual, you want to do accrual. And I would do, you know, last year, run the report. Obviously, this is a sample file, so it's not going to have much in it. Do the file that way, and it's going to run every transaction. So the general ledger is a report that's going to give you every single transaction in the file. You want to do it by date because if you get an audit— I just had a client that went through a 3-year audit— you want to have those 3 years in place year by year because that's how they want to see it in the actual paperwork that you give them. You can send them the Excel spreadsheets. You want to make sure you've got those reports saved. If you save them, I highly recommend saving them to a place in the cloud that you'll be able to access them if something happens. If you had a data file or computer meltdown or the hard drive went on your computer, you want to be able to access them. A lot of people use— I use ShareFile because it encrypts on the way up and encrypts on the way back. I really don't want my data floating out there in cyberspace that can be accessed. Some people use Dropbox. It doesn't encrypt on the way up and down, but there are other alternate ways to save your data in the cloud, but I highly recommend that. So that's the 2 ways you can do it. You can either export to a desktop file, QuickBooks Desktop If you have the ability or have a contact that can do that for you, it's worth the money because then it's a workable file. The other way to do it, and I would also recommend doing this, is with the Excel spreadsheets. Export your general ledger, your profit and loss, and your balance sheet. Once you get that, you're going to receive— once you've canceled, you're going to receive an email from Intuit confirming the cancellation. So don't just let it go and say, all right, I hit cancel and it's happened. You want to make sure that it's actually happened. So let's go to the email that you would receive. So what would happen is you're going to get a cancellation email, then you're going to get this one. What happens to the file is it automatically transfers over after you hit cancel. You'll have 30 days to kind of a grace period to let you change your mind, and if you don't change your mind, then the trial is going to end. So you're going to get a trial ended email saying that you're completely done here. You're not going to have access to it anymore other than the view only. So in this particular file, I actually did create a desktop file and gave it to the client so he had access to it. But that's basically what you're going to see when you receive the email. And obviously you can go back and subscribe, but you have— if you don't resubscribe, you have access for the 3 months, and then after the 3 months, they can have to reactivate the the account again for you. So that's it in a nutshell. It's not really a big topic, but it's a topic that trips up some people because they want to know what's going on with their file after they cancel and, you know, is it ever going to come back. You have the data available for 90 days after the trial expires. If you have a credit card that declines on your file, you have 14 days to update it in your QuickBooks folder or you're going to lose that data too. You'll have full access during those 14 days, and after that your account will be suspended and then you won't be able to do anything in it until you resubscribe and pay for it. Basically, we just— I'm just recommending that you export your file. You can export all your data to Excel or to a desktop version, and you have up to 1 year after you cancel to do that. If you're in trial version of QuickBooks Online, you need to export that data within 90 days. So that's it. I will provide links on how to export to desktop, and maybe I'll do a video on that in the future. It is a little tricky. Seems like each time I do it, it's a little bit easier, so they are obviously fixing it and making it better. But if you have any questions about this topic, feel free to reach out to me because I know it's a bit of a an interesting setup. But if you're converting your file or starting over or whatever you're doing, you know, you're canceling your file, it's going to be out there in the cloud for a little bit. So you're not going to be completely cut off from the data, but bear in mind that once that time lapses, you will not be able to access it anymore. Thank you for watching this video. I hope it was helpful, and we'll see you next time.
