Straight answers.
The questions finance directors, treasurers, and bookkeepers actually ask before they hand OpenBooks the work — answered plainly, without the sales gloss.
Existing tools & lock-in
Do I have to replace QuickBooks?
No. OpenBooks works WITH your QuickBooks ledger. QB stays as the ledger of record; OpenBooks does the work QB doesn’t — matching, filings, evidence collection, approvals, publishing.
What if I use Xero, Wave, or Bill.com?
QB is our first integration; Xero is next. Bill.com: we do more than bill approval so we usually replace it, but we can co-exist.
What happens to my current bookkeeper?
They stop chasing receipts and start reviewing exceptions. Most bookkeepers keep their retainer at 30–50% of prior scope. Firms can be added to your account as an auditor role.
Will this break my accountant’s year-end workflow?
No. Year-end packet exports as clean 990 (or 1120/1120-S) worksheets straight from the closed books.
Trust & security
Who else can see my financial data?
No one outside your tenant. Your data processes only on hardware we control. We don’t send customer data in prompts to third-party AI providers.
What happens if OpenBooks goes down?
Every transaction and filing exports nightly to your own storage. The immutable ledger is publicly verifiable — even if we disappear, your books survive.
Are you SOC 2?
Not yet. Pre-SOC 2, we run on Supabase (SOC 2 Type II) with row-level security and hash-chained event log. SOC 2 Type I is on the roadmap.
Will my data train an AI model?
No. We use local models for reasoning about your data. Frontier models only see anonymized reasoning — never customer data in the prompt.
Accuracy & liability
What if OpenBooks miscategorizes something?
Every classification has a confidence score. Anything below threshold surfaces for your approval. You can override anything. Every override teaches the system your org’s rules. All changes are ledger events.
Who’s liable if a filing is wrong?
You are — this is a bookkeeping tool, not a licensed CPA firm. But the packet is reviewable end-to-end before submission, every field traces to source, and the immutable ledger means you can always prove what you approved and when.
Can I edit what OpenBooks does?
Yes. Approve, reject, reclassify, split. Every action is a ledger event, so nothing is silently overwritten.
Do you provide an audit trail?
The immutable ledger IS the audit trail — cryptographically verifiable, tamper-resistant, publishable to auditors on demand.
Fundraising (Books that raise money)
How does this actually raise more money?
Five mechanisms: filings on time keep your 501(c)(3) status intact; current books capture grant windows; public Financial Record answers “where does my money go” before donors ask; compliance signal opens foundation gates; clean board reports get bigger asks approved.
Where does the 62% number come from?
Candid’s 2023 study of 148,786 nonprofits: verified-transparency-seal orgs receive 62% more in donations than peers without the seal.
Do you help us earn a Candid seal?
Yes. From the books you already keep here, OpenBooks pre-fills your Candid transparency profile — name, EIN, address, area of focus and more pull straight from your filings — and hands you a guided, copy-paste-ready flow for the rest. Candid has no submission API and Candid (not us) issues the seal, so we don’t auto-submit or claim to grant it; we get you to their Bronze/Silver/Gold/Platinum criteria in minutes instead of hours. Fields we can’t source honestly say “needs your input” rather than guess. It lives on the “Candid seal” tab in your workspace.
Do you have customer case studies?
Not yet. We’re early. Founding customers get pricing that reflects that.
Privacy & public ledger
Is everything public?
No. Public and private are your choice per row and per period. Default is private. You publish only what you want donors to see.
What about donor privacy?
Schedule B individual donors stay private, always. The public ledger shows aggregate totals plus org-level donors (foundations, corporate) which are already public via 990.
What if a donor asks to be private who’s on our public list?
One-click hide. Publicly the row shows as “Aggregated” with amount, no name.
Pricing & onboarding
What does it cost?
$149/month, flat. No per-seat, no per-transaction, no metered AI.
How long does setup take?
5-10 minutes. Connect your bank (or QuickBooks), confirm your org details (auto-populated from public 990 for nonprofits), pick your role, done. First Financial Record is visible before you finish onboarding.
Do I need to migrate historical data?
No. We pull your last 24 months from QuickBooks automatically. Older filings pull from public records if you’re a nonprofit or candidate.
What if we want to leave?
Full data export as Parquet/CSV/JSON, including the ledger event chain with hashes. Your books are portable by design.
AI concerns
Will AI mess up my books?
It won’t touch anything above your approval threshold without you. You can lower that threshold to $0 during your first month.
How do I know it’s actually doing the work?
Every event has a source (bank feed, invoice email, receipt upload) and every action has an author (OpenBooks or you). The public verify endpoint lets you or your auditor recompute the entire chain in seconds.