Last Updated: 19 August 2026
The books you keep in AIONA are yours. You can take all of them out, in open formats, at any time, from inside the product, without asking us and without paying anything. This page says exactly what that export contains, how to get it, and what happens to your data when you leave. Where something has a limit, we state it.
Sign in, open Settings, choose Privacy & Data, and click Download everything (ZIP). The download is for the company you currently have selected; switch company and click again for each client. An administrator or accountant on the company can do this. Read-only auditor accounts cannot, because they are viewers of the books, not custodians of them.
The ZIP is built while it downloads, so a company with years of documents takes a few minutes rather than a few seconds. Nothing is queued or emailed later: the file that arrives is the export.
You do not have to use the whole-company download. Every report screen also exports its own data as CSV, Excel or PDF, the Audit Log page exports the audit trail as CSV, and the Vault builds a dated evidence pack for any period as a ZIP with the documents inside. The single download above is the one that takes everything at once.
| File | What it holds | Format |
|---|---|---|
chart_of_accounts.csv | Every ledger account: name, type, active flag, created date. | CSV |
journals.csv | Every posted journal, one row per line, with the journal's reference, date, source and description repeated on each line, and the line's account code, account name, debit and credit. Draft journals are not included; they are not part of the books. | CSV |
contacts.csv | Suppliers and customers with their addresses, VAT numbers and payment terms. | CSV |
invoices.csv and bills.csv | Sales invoices and supplier bills as records: number, counterparty, dates, status, subtotal, VAT, total, amount paid, outstanding. | CSV |
bank_transactions.csv | Every imported or feed bank line with date, description, amount, direction, reference, balance and match status. | CSV |
vat_snapshots.csv | The frozen VAT figures for each closed period (output, input, net), one row per snapshot version. When any exist, vat_snapshots.json carries the full per-line breakdown behind each figure. | CSV, JSON |
audit_trail.csv | The company's complete append-only audit trail: every event, who or what caused it, when, and its before and after hashes. | CSV |
documents.csv | An index of every document you uploaded: its id, filename, type, status, upload date, the posted journals it produced, and the path it was written to inside the ZIP (or the reason it could not be included). | CSV |
documents/ | The original files themselves. See section 4. | As uploaded |
manifest.json | The company, the time of export, who requested it, a row count for every file above, the byte size and SHA-256 of every file in the ZIP, a list of any document that could not be included with the reason, and a single complete flag that is only true when nothing is missing. | JSON |
manifest.json, vat_snapshots.json) are plain, indented JSON.There is no proprietary format anywhere in the download and nothing that needs AIONA to read.
Every file you uploaded (or forwarded in by email) is written to documents/ byte for byte as it was stored. The manifest lists each one with its SHA-256, so you can confirm the copy you received is the copy we hold.
If an original cannot be produced, the export does not pretend otherwise and does not drop it silently. The document is named in manifest.json under documents_missing with the reason, the same document appears in documents.csv with that status, and complete is set to false. You will know exactly which file to ask us about.
The self-serve download is capped at 5,000 documents or about 2 GB of documents per company. Above that the button tells you so before anything is sent, and we prepare the full export for you by email at no charge. If you hit the cap, write to support@aionatech.com with the company name.
Each export is recorded in your company's audit trail (who requested it and when), so a later reviewer can see that the data left and on whose instruction.
Exporting does not delete anything. Your books stay in AIONA until you close the account or ask us to remove them.
Accounting records and the documents that evidence them are kept for the statutory UK retention period after they are posted, because a bookkeeping record that can be quietly destroyed is not a record. Personal data outside that obligation is deleted on account closure or on written request, and personal identifiers inside the retained records are anonymised. The exact periods and the legal basis are set out in section 6 of our Privacy Policy and section 7 of the Data Processing Agreement.
For anything on this page, including a full export above the self-serve limit, a deletion request, or a question about what a file in the download means, write to support@aionatech.com. Data-protection rights requests are answered within the UK GDPR one-month window, as set out in our Privacy Policy.