Export your data — backups and ownership

SalesThumb's data export policy: your data is yours, you can get it any time, in usable formats, without questions.

This article documents what you can export today — for backups, for auditors, for switching platforms (we hope you don't, but if you do, we make it easy) — and how.

What you can export

From Settings → Data Export, on-demand as CSV or JSON:

• Customers — contact details, addresses, lifetime totals
• Appointments — all-time schedule history
• Quotes — quote pipeline with totals and status
• Invoices — invoices with totals
• Payments — every recorded payment (cash, card, ACH, etc.)
• Vehicles — customer-owned vehicles with VIN + plate
• Job photos — one row per job photo: photo ID, job (appointment), customer and vehicle IDs, photo type, file name, file type and size, taken/created dates, and a download link for the image. The links are signed and expire 24 hours after you download the export — re-export to get fresh links. This is a list of links, not a ZIP of the image files. Photos already past your plan's photo-retention window aren't included.

Each of those is a one-click CSV or JSON download, with a live record count shown before you click. Separately, you can also pull your full audit log as CSV — every change made to the shop (who, what, when) — for compliance use.

Photo ZIP archives (the image files themselves in one download), warranty-record exports, message-history exports, and inventory exports aren't part of this data-export flow today; if you need one of those for a specific reason, contact hello@salesthumb.com.

All exports include the original timestamps and identifying IDs so the data is portable to any other system.

How to export

Settings → Data Export. Under "On-demand exports," click CSV or JSON next to any of the data types — the file streams straight to your browser, no waiting.

Each export is capped at 50,000 rows. If a shop has more records than that in one entity, that download returns an error asking you to contact support for a larger one-time pull — there's no automatic background/email fallback for oversized on-demand exports today.

Schedule automatic exports

If you want recurring exports without clicking through manually each time:

1. Settings → Data Export → "Schedule new export"
2. Pick the entity (Customers, Appointments, Quotes, Invoices, Payments, or Vehicles — job photos are on-demand only, since their download links expire), format (CSV or JSON), and frequency — Daily, Weekly, or Monthly
3. Enter the destination email address
4. Save

Scheduled exports are delivered by email only — there's no S3/GCS/Azure/Dropbox/Google Drive upload option today. The delivery cron runs overnight; you can also hit "Run now" on any scheduled export to fire it immediately instead of waiting for the next cycle. Each scheduled export can be toggled on/off or deleted from the same page, and shows its last-run status.

Export formats

• CSV (UTF-8) for the customer/appointment/quote/invoice/payment/vehicle/job-photo exports and the audit log. Opens cleanly in Excel, Google Sheets, Numbers, and any database importer.
• JSON is also available for the same entities — pick it from the format dropdown on-demand or when scheduling.

If you use QuickBooks Online, that's a separate one-way sync (Settings → Integrations → QuickBooks Online) that pushes paid invoices directly — see Exporting financials to QuickBooks — rather than a file format inside this export flow.

If you need a one-off pull in a format we don't support natively (XML for a legacy system, a proprietary tool format), contact hello@salesthumb.com and we'll see what we can do.

Data ownership policy

To make this unambiguous: we don't own your data. You do. Specifically:

• We never sell your customer data to anyone, for any reason.
• We never use your customer data to train AI models (your data, your privacy).
• If you cancel SalesThumb, your data isn't deleted automatically — it stays in place, unchanged, until you reactivate or send an explicit deletion request (see /docs/data-retention). Once your cancellation takes effect (see Terms §15: cancelling needs 30 days' notice before your next billing date), your team can no longer sign in, so export what you need before then, or ask us for an export afterward.
• If you need an extended grace period (acquisition, audit, lawsuit), contact us — we'll accommodate with documentation.
• We respond to data-portability requests in any country with applicable law (GDPR, CCPA, etc.) within the required timeframes.

If any of this isn't satisfactory for your compliance needs, talk to us. Tell us what you need and we'll tell you honestly what we can support.

What we keep after you cancel

Canceling doesn't delete anything by itself. If you ask us to delete your data, personal details (names, contact info, signatures) are anonymized, but some records are kept — see /docs/data-retention for the full list, including invoice and payment totals and line items (kept as financial history with personal identifiers removed) and the Payment Processing Agreement acceptance record (the accepting person's name and email, redacted 7 years after acceptance). We also keep:

• Aggregate anonymized usage statistics (no PII).
• Financial records required by US tax law (7-year retention for our own accounting).
• Records required by payment processors (separate retention rules).