One set of books, every device

This changed

It used to be a switch called Cloud backup that started off, and you had to press bring my records back to fetch anything. That was the wrong design and it cost people real time: the app asks everybody to create an account, and then declined to use it — so signing in on a laptop showed an empty screen beside a phone full of invoices, and said nothing about why.

Signing in is the whole of it now. It is on for every device, on every plan, free included.

Signing in

An email address and a password, or Sign in with Google. The same account works on the phone and in the browser, so an account made on one signs straight into the other.

On a device holding no records, the app fetches before it shows you anything — you land on your real books rather than on an empty set that fills in behind you. On a device that already has records it opens straight away and catches up in the background.

How quickly

Seconds, in both directions, while both devices are open. A change is sent up a second or two after you make it, and the other device is told to come and look rather than being made to ask — so an invoice finished on the phone is on the laptop about as fast as you can look at it.

A device that was closed or out of signal catches up the moment it is opened again, from exactly where it left off. Nothing is skipped by having been away.

What gets sent

Your business details, clients, invoices and lines, payments, tax rates and groups, payment methods, saved items, repeating schedules, document counters and your history.

What is never sent:

Subscription state. It is a cached answer from Google Play, and carrying it about would be a way to keep a plan you cancelled.
Photos of receipts (Android). A record can travel; a file cannot go with it yet, and “1 photo” on another phone with nothing behind it would be worse than saying so.
Anything that describes one device — how far its own sync has got, which business it is looking at, whether voice invoicing is on there.

How two devices are merged

Continuously, and it is safe because of what the rest of the app already guarantees rather than because of clever guessing:

An issued invoice is frozen. Two devices can never hold two different versions of one, because neither can change it.
Payments are separate rows with their own identities, so two devices recording different payments merge instead of colliding.
Nothing is erased, only marked deleted. A record missing from one side therefore means “has not arrived yet”, never “was deleted” — which is what stops something you deleted coming back.
A counter never goes backwards. Numbers already printed on paper somebody is holding cannot be handed out again.

Only a draft can genuinely disagree, and the later edit wins — which is the answer anybody would expect from a document nobody has issued.

What it costs you: finishing needs a connection

Drafting works with no signal at all. Finishing a document does not: the number is claimed against your account with a check-and-set, so two devices cannot take the same one.

That is a deliberate trade. Offline issuing, several devices and gapless numbering — you can have two of the three, and the two worth keeping are the ones you could be audited on. A duplicate invoice number is not fixable after the fact. See invoice numbering.

Who can read it

Your account, and nothing else. The rules on the store are written so that a signed-in user can reach their own records and no one else's, and every write has to carry its own owner — enforced on the server, not just in the app.

Deleting your account removes the copy. Your device keeps its own records; see deleting your account.

You should still keep a backup file

The copy in your account survives a cleared browser and a new phone, which is most of what people lose records to. It does not survive you losing the account, and it is on infrastructure we run rather than infrastructure you own. A backup file is the copy you hold, and that is a different kind of safe.

If something looks missing

Check both devices are signed in to the same account. Two accounts is by far the commonest answer, and nothing else will explain it.
Press “Check now” on the Account screen. It does by hand what the app does by itself and tells you what it found, which is the quickest way to tell a slow connection from a real problem.
“Could not reach your account” — usually no connection. It retries by itself, and nothing is skipped by having failed.
Verify your email — check the mail, then press refresh on the Account screen. Verifying it elsewhere does not always tell the app by itself.

Back: backup and export Next: moving to a new device