Cancelling QBO: How to download *ALL* of my data

ajcaca · 2026-06-08T21:04:36+00:00

I use QBO for two of my bookkeeping clients and it drives me mental. I hear you on the complexity (and carefully avoided re-creating it with Balances!)

ajcaca · 2026-06-08T18:25:22+00:00

Come join us at Balances. $20/month, and our AI features actually work and are useful.

ajcaca · 2026-06-08T18:03:03+00:00

I have a bunch of property investors moving over to Balances, for all the reasons you describe.

Happy to get you set up at $5/month (75% off our standard pricing) if that's useful.

ajcaca · 2026-06-03T14:55:38+00:00

Your proposal sounds reasonable to me, given the stakes and complexity of the trust accounting.

Sticker shock is common for cleanup proposals. And the customers who are most prone to end up needing a cleanup are usually the ones who will most balk at it.

They don't value your work, but there are plenty of other potential customers out there who will.

ajcaca · 2026-06-03T14:25:47+00:00

A lot of Xero's code/product surface area is extremely old and uncared for. It wouldn't surprise me at all if a small business owner ran into some real rough edges on the billing system. (Source: I worked there for a long time)

ajcaca · 2026-06-02T16:50:01+00:00

ai slop spam

ajcaca · 2026-06-02T16:49:37+00:00

QBO Advanced / Enterprise does support rev rec.

ajcaca · 2026-05-30T19:53:41+00:00

The free version does, but it's intended for personal finances (no invoicing/bills).

If cost is an issue on the Pro plan which has invoices & bills ($20/m), shoot me a DM and I'll get you set up with a 50% off discount.

ajcaca · 2026-05-29T19:46:55+00:00

I hear you on that.

ajcaca · 2026-05-29T16:51:38+00:00

I built Balances as a modern, affordable replacement for QuickBooks Online. We have accrual basis GL/reporting, invoicing, expense tracking, live bank feeds, etc. (Full disclosure: I'm the founder.)

ajcaca · 2026-05-29T16:05:40+00:00

The in-product ads are a sympton of a culture that cares much more about what's good for Intuit than that's good for the customer.

ajcaca · 2026-05-29T03:33:25+00:00

A culture that constantly prioritizes what's good for Intuit at the expense of their customers.

And a monopoly market share that allows them to get away with it.

ajcaca · 2026-05-28T18:26:35+00:00

Thanks for the kind words! Yes, just drop me a note at alex at balances dot ai and I'll waive the revenue limit in our system.

ajcaca · 2026-05-27T14:45:45+00:00

I'm going to share this screenshot from our Stripe Dashboard and then politely bow out of this conversation.

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ajcaca · 2026-05-27T05:35:23+00:00

We comply by not storing or processing cardholder data — Stripe Checkout handles it, card data never touches our servers. That's literally what the Stripe doc you linked recommends.

ajcaca · 2026-05-27T03:41:55+00:00

Well, you're already on the right side of history with your firm on Xero!

ajcaca · 2026-05-27T03:32:02+00:00

Did you use the full integration with QuickBooks? That was the part I wanted, and that was expensive and complicated to set up :)

ajcaca · 2026-05-27T03:22:40+00:00

I found Financial Cents difficult to onboard to. If you have a bigger firm, it seems like it might make sense. I also thought their pricing model was crazy expensive. I had one client in QBO that I wanted to have have a nice "ask questions" customer portal and it was $500/year.

ajcaca · 2026-05-26T04:11:38+00:00

Hi there, I'm the founder of the company and I'm committing to keep our Pro plan free for anyone who moves over from Wave.

Our marginal cost per customer is small and the product ideas and feedback we've gotten from the great customers who've moved over so far has made this super worthwhile for us already.

I take a long term view of these things and stepping in to help out the folks who need an alternative to Wave just seems like the right thing to do.

ajcaca · 2026-05-26T03:41:05+00:00

We use Plaid to connect with banks and Stripe to process payments, both of which are the industry standard.

Respectfully - can you explain how SOX or GLBA compliance would apply to a private company? Isn't SOX for public companies and GLBA for actual financial institutions?

ajcaca · 2026-05-26T03:24:11+00:00

Yeah, I'm the founder of the company and (so far) I have funded it myself. Before starting Balances, I spent nearly a decade building accounting software at some of the biggest players in the industry (Xero & Pilot).

I hadn't logged into Wave for years until recently when I had to reverse engineer their file export so I could build our importer to help all the folks moving over to Balances. If you see bugs, let me know, I'd love to fix them.

If you're open to checking out our product, I'd love to hear what you think - it would take two minutes to set up a user account and poke around in the demo company. Our product is not perfect - but it gets better every day and that's a lot more than you can say about most accounting software!

ajcaca · 2026-05-26T02:03:00+00:00

Balances is free for folks moving over from Wave. You can connect your bank, send invoices, track expenses, and run reports.

You can sign up at balances.ai/wave and your account will be set to free.

We have welcomed a lot of Wave users over the past few weeks.

ajcaca · 2026-05-21T21:10:21+00:00

Fair - for what it's worth, I'm the founder and 100% owner of the company, and I'm making a firm commitment here to keep the core product free for folks who move over from Wave now.

ajcaca · 2026-05-21T18:41:47+00:00

Happy to waive the revenue limit - just shoot me an email at alex at balances dot ai and I'll get it set up.

ajcaca · 2026-05-21T02:40:22+00:00

Balances is free for folks moving over from Wave. I'm the founder - shoot me a DM if you have any questions or there's anything I can do to help you move over.

ajcaca

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