Straight answers.

No. QuickBooks can remain your accounting system. Connect it from your organization settings for a read-only import of your accounting data, or provide an export. OpenBooks prepares the matching, evidence, reports, and filing work around it without writing changes back to QuickBooks.

You can keep them. OpenBooks supports read-only exports or advisor access for Xero, Wave, and Bill.com today. The integrations directory labels each connection as live, manually enabled, or coming soon so you can see the current delivery method before you start.

They can stay involved as a reviewer or advisor. OpenBooks handles the recurring preparation and surfaces exceptions; your bookkeeper or CPA keeps the professional judgment and year-end review.

No. OpenBooks prepares a source-linked year-end package from the closed books. Your accountant reviews the package and remains responsible for tax positions, signatures, and filing.

Your workspace is private by default and tenant-isolated. Only people you authorize can access it. A public Financial Record is a separate, explicit publication step, and you choose what appears there.

You can request an export of your ledger and supporting data in portable formats. Published Financial Records are frozen snapshots, while your underlying accounting records remain yours and can be exported before you leave.

OpenBooks does not currently hold SOC 2 certification. Scoping is underway. Meanwhile, we run on Supabase (SOC 2 Type II) with row-level security and a hash-chained event log.

No. OpenBooks does not use your private financial data to train foundation models. Where a model provider is used, the task is routed according to the data type and the provider is not permitted to train on your customer data.

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.

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.

Yes. Approve, reject, reclassify, split. Every action is a ledger event, so nothing is silently overwritten.

The immutable ledger IS the audit trail — cryptographically verifiable, tamper-resistant, publishable to auditors on demand.

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.

Candid’s 2023 study of 148,786 nonprofits: verified-transparency-seal orgs receive 62% more in donations than peers without the 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.

Not yet. We are early, so we show the workflow, the public-source records, and the exact product boundary instead of inventing outcomes.

No. Public and private are your choice per row and per period. Default is private. You publish only what you want donors to see.

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.

One-click hide. Publicly the row shows as “Aggregated” with amount, no name.

$199/month, flat. No per-seat, no per-transaction, no metered AI.

The guided setup takes a few minutes. Confirm the organization details we can prefill from public records, choose your role, and connect a supported source or provide a read-only export. The time to a current Financial Record depends on how much history needs reconciliation.

Not by hand. OpenBooks can start from an accounting export, bank statements, and the public filings already attached to nonprofit or candidate records. We agree on the history needed for your first reporting period before importing it.

Full data export as Parquet/CSV/JSON, including the ledger event chain with hashes. Your books are portable by design.

It won’t touch anything above your approval threshold without you. You can lower that threshold to $0 during your first month.

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.