Finding and exporting your QuickBooks data

What it holds

QuickBooks stores invoices, purchases, payments and journal entries alongside customer and supplier lists. Receipts and other supporting documents may be attached to those entries.

Where QuickBooks shows the size

1. Open Reports > Standard reports as a primary or company admin and find Transaction List by Date.
2. Cover the first transaction through today; choose Export/Print > Export to Excel.
3. Count data rows after removing headings and totals; deduplicate transaction identifiers if entries span several lines.

Plan and admin role. Primary and company admins provide the broadest coverage. Standard All Access users can run reports; View Reports excludes reports containing payroll or contact information.

Exporting the full history

1. Open Settings > TOOLS > Export data; choose a reason and continue.
2. Choose the broadest date range, enable the needed Reports and Lists, then select Export to Excel and confirm to download the ZIP.
3. Retrieve supporting files from Settings > LISTS > Attachments, select files, then Batch actions > Export.
4. Export estimates from sales transactions and purchase orders from expense transactions separately.

The main export covers posting transactions and selected lists, not every record type or attachment.

For QuickBooks Desktop, use File > Utilities > Verify Data before creating a company-file backup; a Desktop backup is different from an Online spreadsheet export.

You don't need to run an export to talk to us, and there's no need to clean it first — removing personal data is part of our work.