Export your books

One Export — a section or everything — readable by a person and complete enough to rebuild from, attachments included. Schedule it and there is no separate backup to keep correct.

Before you start

There is one Export, and there is no separate backup. That is a deliberate decision worth knowing about, because it means the file you hand your CPA and the file you would rebuild from are the same file.

Two artifacts — a readable export and a faithful backup — is the obvious design, and it was rejected: two formats means two things to keep correct, and the one that rots is the one nobody produces by hand. Which is precisely the one that matters on the day it matters.

So an Export is both at once. Columns a person can read, plus the ids, relationships and manifest needed to reconstruct from it.

It carries the attachment bytes. Every receipt, every statement, every remittance advice. A receipt you cannot take with you is not yours.

Its scope is one section or every section, and the whole is simply every part — the Journal you hand a CPA is the same Journal that appears in a complete Export.

Where it goes

An Org chooses where its Exports land:

• Pushed from the server to storage the Org has connected.
• Written by Pippin for Mac to a folder you pick.

Pippin keeps no copies. An Export is your data leaving, not a second place it lives.

Steps

Good to know

A scheduled Export carries the ledger in full every time, and only the attachments the last one did not have. The books are small and re-sending them is free; the attachments are the bulk, and re-sending those every night is how a nightly export becomes something somebody turns off.

Export is worth keeping to Owners. It takes a complete copy of the business, in files, somewhere Pippin cannot see — which is exactly what makes it valuable and exactly what makes it worth restricting.