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Data & Record Keeping

FairBooks stores your financial records securely in the cloud. This page explains how your data is backed up, how long records are retained, what happens when you delete them, and how to export your data. Useful context if the ATO ever asks about your record-keeping system.

Tip

The ATO requires most business records to be kept for five years from when they were prepared or the relevant transaction completed. FairBooks makes it easy to meet this requirement, but it's ultimately your responsibility to ensure records are retained for the required period before deleting them.

Backup

FairBooks runs on managed cloud infrastructure. Your data is:

  • Backed up automatically to protect against hardware and software failures
  • Encrypted at rest and in transit

These backups protect against infrastructure-level failures. They do not protect against records you choose to delete. If you need to keep a copy of a record outside FairBooks, use the export options before deleting it.

Retention

FairBooks uses a two-stage deletion model to protect against accidental data loss:

Stage What happens Duration
Active Records are visible and usable in your organisation Indefinite (until you delete)
Rubbish bin Soft-deleted records are moved to the rubbish bin and can be restored 30 days
Permanent deletion Records are permanently removed from the database After 30 days in rubbish bin

Warning

Once a record passes through the 30-day rubbish bin window, it cannot be recovered. Make sure you no longer need a record before deleting it, especially if you haven't yet met the ATO's five-year retention requirement.

To restore a deleted record within the 30-day window, or to remove records for good, see Rubbish bin.

If your subscription is cancelled

Cancelling puts the organisation into export-only mode: you can still sign in and download your records, but you cannot use FairBooks normally. That window lasts 30 days from cancellation, after which the organisation and all of its records are permanently deleted.

Resubscribing during the 30 days clears the window and restores full access. A failed payment does not start the clock: you keep normal access while FairBooks retries the payment, and the 30 days only begin if the subscription is cancelled. See Your subscription.

Your personal data export (Download My Data) is separate and stays available.

Your responsibility

FairBooks retains your active records for as long as your account exists. However, it is your responsibility to:

  • Not delete records that are still within the ATO's five-year retention period
  • Export records before deleting them if you want to keep a copy outside FairBooks
  • Maintain your account to ensure continued access to your data

Destruction

When a record is permanently deleted (after 30 days in the rubbish bin), the following happens:

  • Database records are removed from the database
  • Attached files such as receipt images are removed from storage
  • Audit log entries for that record are retained, so there is still a trail showing that the record existed and when it was deleted

The audit log entry does not contain the full content of the deleted record. It records the action (e.g., "Invoice #1042 deleted") and who performed it. See Audit Log for more detail.

When a whole organisation is deleted, its records go with it, and so does its audit log. Your user account itself is kept, so you can still sign in to any other organisation you belong to or start a new one.

Export

FairBooks provides several ways to export your data:

  • Full data export: owners and admins can download a complete copy of the organisation's records (customers, invoices, expenses, quotes, recurring items, products, chart of accounts, and settings) as a single ZIP of CSV files, along with receipt files and invoice PDFs. See Exporting your data.
  • BAS report CSV: export your Business Activity Statement data from Reporting > BAS Reports. See BAS Reports.
  • Profit & Loss CSV: export your income and expense summary from Reporting > Profit & Loss. See Profit & Loss.
  • Invoice PDFs: download individual invoice PDFs from the invoice detail view

Tip

A regular full export is a simple way to keep your own copy of your records outside FairBooks, useful for ATO record-keeping or migrating to another platform.

ATO Record-Keeping Compliance

FairBooks is a digital record-keeping system that aligns with the ATO's requirements for business records. Specifically:

  • Records are kept electronically in a structured, searchable format
  • Records are backed up automatically with cloud infrastructure
  • Records are readable and can be produced as PDFs or CSV exports
  • An audit trail tracks who created, modified, or deleted records and when
  • Receipts are fingerprinted with a checksum when you upload them, so an exported receipt can be checked against the file you originally submitted. See Exporting your data.

For more information on the ATO's digital record-keeping requirements, see the ATO's guide to digital record keeping.