Frequently asked questions

It drafts the written commentary for monthly report packages: the two-to-four sentence narratives under the executive summary, P&L, and cash sections. It never calculates numbers: every figure it may reference (revenue, margins, category totals, deltas) is computed by our backend first and passed to the model pre-formatted, with instructions to reference only those values.

No. Every AI draft is labeled as a draft, is fully editable, and must be explicitly approved by you, section by section, before a package can be finalized. The database enforces this, not just the interface. Your edits are stored separately from the original AI text, so the audit trail shows exactly what the model wrote and what you changed.

Commentary is drafted by Anthropic’s Claude (currently the claude-opus-5 model). If the API is unavailable or declines a request, a deterministic built-in drafter produces the starting text from the same figures instead, and the package records which one produced it, visibly labeled in the review screen.

Aggregated period figures (revenue, margins, expense category totals, month-over-month and year-over-year deltas, cash and AR/AP balances), plus the client company’s name. Raw transaction detail, your clients’ customer and vendor names, and account numbers are not sent.

No. Commentary drafting runs on the commercial API of Anthropic, our AI provider, whose terms exclude API inputs and outputs from model training unless the customer explicitly opts in. We have not opted in.

Up to 30 days for drafting data, up to 90 for encrypted backups. Figures sent for commentary drafting are retained by Anthropic under their standard commercial API terms for up to 30 days, then automatically deleted, except where flagged by their trust-and-safety systems or where retention is legally required. Encrypted database backups rotate out after 90 days. The full list of providers, and what each one touches, is on the security page.

The chart of accounts, 24 months of monthly P&L and balance sheet history, open invoices and bills (for AR/AP and cash forecasting), and the trailing twelve months of transaction detail. Data refreshes automatically when the books change, with a daily sweep as backstop.

No. Nothing in the product creates, edits, or deletes anything in your clients’ books; the application never writes to a connected company. The authorization Intuit grants is their standard accounting scope, and our use of it is read-only by construction.

Two ways, both immediate. In AboveBoard, open the client’s page and click Disconnect: we revoke our token with Intuit and delete it from our systems. Or revoke access from the QuickBooks side (Intuit app settings), which invalidates the token at the source. Either way syncing stops, the client’s page shows a reconnect banner, and already-synced data (financials, reports, forecasts, alerts) remains in AboveBoard until you delete the client or your account. See the data rights section below for how deletion works.

Tokens are encrypted with AES-256-GCM before storage, in a table application users cannot query at all, and are decrypted only server-side after your access to that specific client has been verified. The encryption key lives only in our server environment. We never see your QuickBooks password: the connection uses Intuit’s OAuth flow.

The client’s page shows the connection state and a reconnect button, the affected data is flagged as possibly stale, and a “no sync in 7 days” alert rule exists (on by default). Reconnecting re-authorizes through Intuit and the data catches up automatically.

At the database level, with PostgreSQL row-level security on every table. Isolation does not depend on application code behaving. An automated suite of over a hundred cross-tenant checks runs on every change, and a schema check fails the build if a new table ships without isolation probes. The full picture is on the security page.

In the United States (database on AWS us-east-2 via Supabase; application on Vercel). Traffic is TLS-encrypted in transit; storage is encrypted at rest by the database provider, with an additional application-layer AES-256-GCM layer on QuickBooks tokens and AES-256 encryption on backups.

One person. AboveBoard is operated by its builder, who can access production data through provider dashboards and service credentials, for operations and support. There is no anonymized-support tier or access-approval workflow yet; at this size, that would be theater. Every material action in the application is audit-logged, and error reports are mechanically scrubbed of financial figures and client names before leaving our servers.

Nightly, plus before every schema change. The nightly backups are AES-256 encrypted, retained for 90 days, and automatically restore-tested before they count: a backup that will not restore fails the job loudly. We also run quarterly manual restore drills.

Up to 24 hours of changes (nightly backup cadence), with recovery taking 15 to 60 minutes depending on the scenario. Financial data synced from QuickBooks is re-derivable from the source at any time, so the true exposure is same-day report edits, forecasts, and settings. Point-in-time recovery (minutes, not hours) is planned as the product moves out of early access.

If you leave, you can request an export of your data and deletion of your account (see data rights below). If AboveBoard were to shut down, we would provide notice and an export path before any data was deleted. Your source data is never hostage in either case: your clients’ books live in QuickBooks, and AboveBoard holds a synced copy.

Solo $149, Practice $299, or Firm $499 per month, by connected client count, with two months free on annual billing. Full details are on the pricing page. Paid plans are billed by direct invoice today; self-serve checkout is being built.

AboveBoard is invite-only during early access. Apply through the design partner page, which is free for your first 6 months in exchange for honest product feedback. Otherwise, request a demo and we set you up on a paid plan, billed by direct invoice.

Connected client companies. The limit is enforced by the application when you add clients; alerts, forecasts, and reports do not count against anything.

Email us. Send a note to hello@aboveboardhq.com and we provide your organization’s data in a machine-readable format, within 30 days and usually much faster. Your clients’ source books remain in QuickBooks regardless.

Email us. We delete the requested data from the live database, and it then ages out of encrypted backups within the 90-day rotation window. Deleting a client removes their synced financials, reports, forecasts, and alerts.

Three things, for bounded periods: encrypted backups (up to 90 days, then rotated out), audit log entries needed for security and integrity of the remaining system, and whatever billing records the law requires us to retain. Details are in the privacy policy.