---
title: "Exports and your accountant — setup guide"
source: https://www.lskhata.com/integrations/export-your-data
category: "Sharing & data"
---

# Exports and your accountant

The question worth asking of any business app is not what it does but what happens when you leave. Khata's answer is that every report exports to CSV, at any time, at no cost — and that you can delete the account and everything in it from inside the app without asking us.

## Before you start
- A Khata account. Nothing else.

## Setting it up

1. **Pick the report** (You) — Day book, party ledger, sales, stock, expenses — whichever your accountant has asked for. Set the date range first; exports follow the filters on screen.
2. **Export** (You) — CSV comes out of both the app and the dashboard. On the dashboard's grid views, JSON is available too where a spreadsheet is not the right shape.
3. **Send it on** (You) — A CSV opens in Excel, Google Sheets, LibreOffice and every accounting package that imports. Nothing about it is proprietary to us.

## What moves, and in which direction
- **Khata → your file** — The rows on screen, with the filters you applied.
- **Not included** — Exports carry your business records. They are not a system backup and do not include account settings or staff credentials.

## How to know it worked
- Open the file before you send it. Row counts should match what the screen showed.
- If your accountant wants a particular layout, ask them once and export that shape every month rather than reformatting each time.

## What this does not do
- No direct Tally, Zoho or QuickBooks connector. CSV is the bridge.
- No scheduled or automatic exports — you run them when you need them.
- No public API to pull data programmatically.

## When it does not work
- **Devanagari text looks like nonsense in Excel.** That is Excel's import encoding, not the file. Import it as UTF-8, or open it in Google Sheets, which detects it correctly.
- **The export has fewer rows than expected.** It follows the filters and the date range on screen. Widen those and export again.

## Common questions

**Is there a fee to export my own data?**

No, and there never will be. Holding a shop's records hostage is not a business model we are willing to have.

**Can I import into Khata from a spreadsheet?**

Yes, on the dashboard's grid views, which accept a paste or an import from a spreadsheet. Send us what you have and we will tell you honestly what moves cleanly before you commit to anything.