When we’re talking about subscription-based services, how long is the data accessible?
Once the data pushes into Xero or Receipt Bank, it stays there. You can, even once you cancel your subscription, you have a read-only access of any data that was pushed into Receipt Bank. You can still access it in Receipt Bank for the required legal time, which I believe here in Australia is seven years. But you can continue to access it in Xero for as long as you’ve got Xero subscription active. It’s a good point to highlight whenever you’re choosing something, identify what’s going to happen when you terminate the subscription. And what’s going to happen with your data. Because what some people have found is they’ve got on board with something and decided to leave it and can’t get any of that information or data out of it. Which makes it difficult, you need to almost replicate everything that you have into the next solution.
If you stop your Xero subscription, you don’t have read-only access to your information.
There are a couple of ways to look at that. If for instance, and you had a Xero subscription, and you needed to maintain it until the end of financial year to do your finances, one thing you could do is downgrade to the very lowest subscription and just keep that going because you’re not going to process employees through it. In Australia, that would get you down to about $25 a month. Alternatively, you could do is you could extract everything, using a solution such as Data Dear, and then you would have everything sitting in Excel. Now the other thing you can do is you can at a point in time is cancel your subscription. The current rules around that are that if you cancel your subscription today, you still have to pay for the following month. But then when you come around to, if we’re talking in Australia, and we have to do our tax, say you end the financial years 30th of June, you need to do the tax in July, you can just reactivate the account in July on the lowest subscription and do it maybe take a week or two to do it, and then cancel it again. The data and all the information is retained in Xero again for the legal period. And you can re-access it. But no, you’re correct, it doesn’t go into read on format. But you can come back in and re-access it anytime up until I believe it’s that seven-year period. I’ve had many clients do that for whatever reason, and it has been quite a simple process, you can reactivate it within very short period of time of requesting it to happen.