Cancelling a QuickBooks Trial? You Only Have 90 Days Before Your Data Is Gone

When you cancel a QuickBooks Online company that was still on a free trial, Intuit keeps it in read-only mode for only 90 days, then deletes it for good. That is a quarter of the one-year window a cancelled paid subscription gets, and the shorter clock is spelled out in Intuit's own cancellation policy. If you started a trial, entered real transactions or imported an existing company, and then let it lapse, this 90-day deadline is what you are actually working against.

Why the trial window is so much shorter

A paid QuickBooks Online subscription that you cancel drops into read-only mode for 12 months before deletion. A company that was only ever on a free trial gets 90 days instead. Intuit treats a trial as an evaluation rather than a paid account, so the grace period it extends after cancellation is far smaller. The end state is identical either way: once the window closes, the company and everything inside it is permanently deleted, and support cannot bring it back.

What makes the trial case sharper is that people do real work inside a trial. You might have built your chart of accounts, connected a bank feed, imported months of history, or uploaded receipts, all before deciding QuickBooks was not the right fit. That data is every bit as real as a paid account's, but it sits on a 90-day fuse instead of a one-year one.

How to tell which clock you're on

The dividing line is whether the company was ever paid for. A company you opened as a free trial and never converted to a paying plan follows the 90-day track. One you paid for at least once follows the 12-month track, even if you barely used it. If you are unsure, check the billing history in your Intuit account, and note the cancellation date, because the countdown runs from the cancellation date or the trial's expiration date, not from the day you stopped logging in.

What "your data" actually includes

Before the clock runs out, it helps to know what is sitting in that company, because it is more than the handful of reports you look at day to day:

• The general ledger, the core record of every posted transaction across the company's life.
• Year-end reports for each period you operated: profit and loss, balance sheet, and trial balance.
• Attachments, meaning the receipts, bills, and documents you uploaded onto transactions.
• The audit log, which records who entered or changed each transaction and when.
• Your master lists: customers, vendors, and the chart of accounts.

QuickBooks' built-in Export Data tool sends most reports and lists to Excel, but Intuit documents that Export to Excel leaves out estimates, purchase orders, customer statements, attachments, and recurring templates. Attachments are the harder gap. You can bulk-export receipts, but Intuit's own guidance notes the files come out separated from the transactions they were attached to, so you also need your own record of which receipt supports which expense.

What to pull in the 90 days

Work in order of what is hardest to reconstruct later:

1. Export the general ledger for the company's entire history. It is the report most likely to help you rebuild the core accounting numbers later.
2. Save the year-end profit and loss, balance sheet, and trial balance for each fiscal period, as both Excel and PDF.
3. Download every attachment, and keep a note of which transaction each file belongs to.
4. Save the audit log separately and export your master lists. QuickBooks does not include the audit log in its standard Export Data tool, so capture it from the audit log screen before access ends.

Our pre-cancel backup checklist walks through all of this step by step, including how to verify the export against your live books before the company disappears.

If 90 days is not enough time

If you cannot get everything out cleanly inside the window, there is one option that buys more time: start a paid subscription while the company is still in read-only. Subscribing during the window reactivates the company into a normal, editable account and stops the 90-day trial clock. From there you are on the paid subscription's terms, so a later cancellation gives you the full one-year read-only window instead of 90 days.

What this does not do is recover a company that has already been deleted. Reactivation only works while the company still exists inside its window. Once the 90 days pass and Intuit deletes the trial company, there is nothing left to reactivate and no way for support to restore it, so paying afterward simply starts a new, empty company.

Why 90 days rarely matches how long you need the records

The short window matters because tax and legal record-keeping runs on a much longer timeline. The IRS generally expects you to keep supporting records for three years, and up to six or seven in specific situations, while a cancelled trial holds your books for 90 days. Our guide on what happens to your QuickBooks Online data when you cancel walks through that gap between the deletion clock and the years an audit can reach back.

If the 90-day clock is already running and you would rather hand the export off than race it, that's the archive we build for you: a complete, verified copy of your QuickBooks Online company, every receipt still linked to its transaction, delivered as a single download before the deadline.