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Terms of Service

Last updated: August 23, 2026

These Terms of Service (the "Terms") are a contract between you and Lion, LLC, an Illinois limited liability company doing business as Books Backup ("Lion," "we," "us," or "our"), the operator of this website and the QuickBooks Online archive service (together, the "Service").

These Terms govern your use of the website and, if you engage us, the archive service. For the archive service, you accept these Terms by signing the engagement agreement for your engagement, which incorporates them by reference. By submitting a form through the website, you agree to these Terms as they apply to website use.

Order of precedence for an engagement:

  1. Your signed engagement agreement
  2. These Terms
  3. The Privacy Policy, which is incorporated to describe our data practices

1. The Service

We produce a one-time archive of the QuickBooks Online company you designate. The archive includes:

  • General ledger, journal, and transaction-list exports
  • Trial balance, balance sheet, profit and loss, and statement of cash flows in both cash and accrual basis
  • The chart of accounts and the customer, vendor, and employee master lists
  • A/R and A/P aging reports, where the company has receivables or payables activity
  • Bank-reconciliation reports, where reconciliations exist in the company
  • 1099 contractor reports, where the company has payments tracked for 1099 reporting
  • The sales tax liability report, where sales tax is set up in the company
  • Transaction attachments, together with an index linking each attachment to its transaction
  • The audit log
  • Payroll reports, where applicable and available
  • A verification report
  • A cover page and summary explaining what the archive contains and how to find things in it

Some items depend on what your company contains: aging, reconciliation, 1099, sales tax, and payroll reports exist only where the company has that activity. We check each of these during the engagement; where your company has no such data, the verification report records that fact rather than omitting the item silently.

Other QuickBooks reports your company can produce are not part of the base archive. They are available through the optional paid Complete Archive upgrade, which adds every report our Reports Library marks "Upgrade", in each case to the extent your company can produce that report. The upgrade has to be selected before the export begins. Your order and your engagement agreement record whether you purchased it, and the current price is on the Pricing page.

The archive is delivered to you as a download. The Service is a snapshot, not a subscription: one engagement produces one archive of one company as it existed at the time of export.

2. What We Need From You

  • Access. An accountant-user invitation to the QuickBooks Online company being archived, sent from Manage users on the "Accounting firms" tab. That is the level the archive requires, and it does not use up one of your billable user seats. QuickBooks has no true read-only user type, and its more restricted options are not sufficient: a "Reports only" user cannot see the audit log or payroll reports, both of which are part of your archive. An accountant invitation carries broad access that you cannot narrow, so we constrain ourselves by promise instead: we use the access only to view and export, and we do not create, edit, delete, or reconcile anything in your books. Your own audit log is where you can check that. The invitation has to be sent while the subscription is active, because a cancelled company cannot invite anyone.
  • Accurate answers to the onboarding questions (company status, payroll usage, cancellation date if applicable), because they determine what we export and how urgently.
  • A signed engagement agreement before any work begins, covering the access you are granting and the processing described in the Privacy Policy, including AI-assisted processing.
  • Timely responses during the engagement, especially your review of the delivered archive.

3. Your Authority

You represent that:

  • You are authorized to grant us access to the QuickBooks company being archived and to receive its contents: you are the owner of the business, or you act with the owner's authority, or you are a professional (such as an accountant, attorney, executor, or trustee) acting within your legal authority over the company's records
  • You may lawfully share the personal information the company contains (for example payroll, employee, customer, and vendor details) for this purpose

We may decline or stop an engagement if authority is unclear. We archive records for preservation and production, never to help anyone conceal records or lock someone out of them.

4. Consent to Processing (Including AI Assistance)

Before work begins, you sign a consent authorizing us to access the QuickBooks company you designate and to process its contents solely to produce your archive.

That processing is AI-assisted: portions of your QuickBooks data (screens, reports, and file listings) are processed through Anthropic's commercial API, under terms that do not permit your data to be used to train AI models and that retain it only for a limited period after processing, with longer retention only where required for safety or legal compliance, as described in the Privacy Policy. We do not currently have a zero-data-retention agreement with Anthropic. We do not use your data for any other purpose and do not sell it.

5. Confidentiality

We treat the nonpublic contents of your QuickBooks company and your archive as confidential. We use and disclose them only to perform the engagement through the service providers identified in the Privacy Policy, your engagement agreement, or another written notice we provide no later than the time the provider first receives your data, to comply with law or legal process, or as you otherwise authorize in writing.

6. Verification, Delivery, and Review

6.1 Verification

Each archive includes a verification report: record counts and report totals checked against your live company at the time of export. Verification means the checks in that report agreed with what QuickBooks showed at export time; it is not a field-by-field check of every item, it does not mean your books are accurate or complete for tax purposes, and it is not a guarantee of acceptance by any auditor, lender, agency, or court. If the archive does not pass our verification, we tell you and refund the fee paid for that archive in full.

6.2 Review and Confirmation

Review your archive promptly after delivery and tell us about any problem:

  • If we hear nothing within 14 days after we make the archive available, receipt is deemed confirmed
  • Once receipt is confirmed (or deemed confirmed), we delete our working copies within 7 days, except while we are fixing a problem you reported
  • Raise anything that looks wrong before that happens, because after deletion we no longer hold a copy (data previously processed through our AI provider remains subject to the retention terms in Section 4)

6.3 Not a Storage Service

Keep at least two copies of the archive in places you control. We are not a storage service and do not provide ongoing storage. We may retain ordinary business records about the engagement (your signed engagement agreement, invoices, correspondence); we do not intentionally retain your financial data in those records, and we ask that you not send financial records through ordinary email outside the delivery workflow.

6.4 Snapshot Limits

The archive reflects what was in your QuickBooks company at the time of export. It cannot include data that QuickBooks had already deleted, data your subscription level did not expose, or data entered after the export.

7. Fees

7.1 Fee

The standard fee is $499 per QuickBooks Online company archived, unless a different fee is stated in your signed engagement agreement; the fee for your engagement is fixed when you sign it. There are no recurring charges, and we do not collect payment through this website. How and when payment is collected is set out in the engagement agreement you sign, not in these Terms.

7.2 Corrections

If, within 30 days of delivery, you find the archive materially incomplete compared with the deliverables listed in these Terms or your engagement agreement, based on data that was available in the QuickBooks company at export time, tell us: we will correct and redeliver it, provided you give us the source access reasonably needed to do so. If the omission cannot reasonably be corrected, we refund the fee paid for that archive; we are not responsible for an inability to correct caused by access being revoked or the QuickBooks subscription being cancelled after delivery.

8. Your Data Stays Yours

As between you and us, you retain all rights in your data. We claim no rights in your QuickBooks data or in the delivered archive beyond what is needed to produce and deliver it.

Specifically, you grant us a limited, non-exclusive, revocable authorization to access the designated company and to copy, process, and package its contents solely to produce, verify, and deliver your archive. That authorization ends when the engagement ends, and we delete our working copies as described in Section 6.2. We do not use your data to develop products, do not create derivative works from it beyond the indexes, summaries, and packaging needed to produce your archive, and do not retain de-identified or aggregated versions of it.

9. Not Accountants, Not a CPA Firm, Not Advice

The Service is a technical data-export and packaging service: we sign in with the access you grant, export what QuickBooks Online shows, verify the exported copy against the source, and package it for delivery. That is the entire Service.

Lion, LLC is not a CPA firm, accounting firm, bookkeeping service, audit firm, or law firm, and no one performing the Service is acting as your certified public accountant, accountant, enrolled agent, bookkeeper, auditor, tax return preparer, or attorney. We do not prepare or file tax returns, do not provide tax consulting, and do not review, correct, reconcile, or advise on the contents of your books. We do not provide tax, accounting, audit, or legal advice, and nothing on this website is such advice. When we receive tax return information from a tax return preparer as a contractor, federal law may treat us as a tax return preparer solely for purposes of IRC sections 7216 and 6713 and their regulations; that statutory status does not make us your accountant or advisor. Whether your records satisfy a particular authority's requirements is a question for your CPA or attorney.

10. Tax Return Preparers (IRC Section 7216)

If you are a tax return preparer engaging us to process client tax return information, you are responsible for determining and satisfying your disclosure basis under section 7216 before sending any client data: taxpayer consent, or a permissible-disclosure provision, if its requirements are satisfied and the archive work qualifies as auxiliary services in connection with tax return preparation under Treas. Reg. 301.7216-2.

Because producing the archive involves processing portions of that information through Anthropic's commercial API, the engagement must also establish a lawful section 7216 basis for that processing; our acknowledgment as your contractor does not by itself authorize the further disclosure to Anthropic. Do not send client tax return information until the required consents and acknowledgments covering each disclosure are in place. We will execute a contractor acknowledgment confirming that sections 7216 and 6713 apply to us in that role, and we can supply a consent template for Form 1040-series return information intended to be consistent with Rev. Proc. 2013-14 for your client. Ask us for the tax-professional engagement pack first.

11. Disclaimer of Warranties

We stand behind our verification step, but we cannot guarantee that the data inside your QuickBooks company is itself complete or accurate, and we cannot guarantee that any authority will accept any particular set of records. The archive reproduces the contents of your QuickBooks company as they exist at export time, including any errors, omissions, or inaccuracies those contents contain; we do not audit, review, or validate the underlying books, and we are not responsible for incorrect, incomplete, or inaccurate information inside them, or for decisions made or actions taken in reliance on the archive's contents. Except as expressly stated in these Terms, the Service and this website are provided "as is" and "as available," and we disclaim all other warranties, express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement, to the maximum extent permitted by law.

12. Limitation of Liability

To the maximum extent permitted by law:

  • Our total aggregate liability arising out of or related to the Service or these Terms is limited to the fee originally paid for the engagement giving rise to the claim, without reduction for any refund
  • Neither party is liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost revenue, or lost goodwill

This section does not limit liability for willful misconduct, willful-and-wanton conduct, or for anything that cannot be limited under applicable law. Some states do not allow certain limitations, so parts of this section may not apply to you.

13. Indemnification

If a third party brings a claim against us because you granted us access you were not authorized to grant, or because information you gave us during onboarding was materially false or misleading, you agree to indemnify us against that claim, including reasonable attorneys' fees.

We will notify you promptly of any such claim, let you control the defense with counsel reasonably acceptable to us, and cooperate reasonably, and we will not settle it in a way that imposes obligations on you without your consent. Your indemnity does not apply to the extent a claim arises from our own breach of these Terms or our own misconduct.

14. Website Content

The content of this website (articles, guides, page copy, and images we created) belongs to Lion, LLC. You may read, link to, and quote it with attribution. Blog content is general information, not advice, as the disclaimer on each post says.

15. Trademarks

The Service is independent and not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Intuit Inc. QuickBooks and QuickBooks Online are trademarks of Intuit Inc., used here only to identify the software the Service works with.

16. Termination

  • You may cancel an engagement at any time before delivery
  • We may decline or terminate an engagement if we cannot verify your authority, if the onboarding answers prove materially inaccurate, if completing it would put us in violation of law, or if we reasonably cannot complete or verify the archive (for example, loss of the access we need, technical incompatibility, or unavailability of a required third-party service)
  • If an engagement is cancelled or terminated before delivery for any of these reasons, we refund the fee paid for that archive in full and delete our working copies within 7 days
  • Cancellation cannot undo processing that already happened before we received it

17. Notices

Send legal notices to us at [email protected]. We send notices to the email address you gave us during onboarding. Email notices are effective when sent unless the sender receives a delivery-failure message.

18. Assignment

You may not assign an engagement without our written consent. We may assign these Terms in connection with a merger, sale of assets, or reorganization, provided the assignee assumes our obligations for active engagements.

19. Governing Law and Disputes

These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of Illinois, without regard to its conflict-of-law principles. Before either of us files any claim, we agree to try to resolve the dispute informally by email for 30 days; this does not prevent either party from seeking emergency injunctive relief or filing when necessary to preserve a legal deadline. Any claim that cannot be resolved informally will be brought in the state or federal courts located in Illinois, and both parties consent to their jurisdiction.

20. Changes to These Terms

We may update these Terms from time to time. Changes will be posted on this page with an updated date. Changes do not apply retroactively to an engagement already in progress; the Terms and Privacy Policy versions in effect when you signed your engagement agreement govern that engagement, except for later changes required by law.

21. Survival, Severability, and Entire Agreement

Sections that by their nature should outlive an engagement survive it, including fees, confidentiality, data ownership, disclaimers, limitation of liability, indemnification, trademarks, and governing law and disputes.

If any part of these Terms is found unenforceable, the rest remains in effect. A failure to enforce a provision is not a waiver of it, and any waiver applies only to the instance it addresses. Neither party is liable for delay caused by events outside its reasonable control, including unavailability of QuickBooks or another required third-party service; your right to cancel before delivery for a full refund, and all deletion obligations, are unaffected by such events. These Terms, the Privacy Policy, and your signed engagement agreement are the entire agreement between us about the Service, in the order of precedence stated at the top.

22. Contact

If you have questions about these Terms, contact:

Lion, LLC (d/b/a Books Backup)
Email: [email protected]