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Organization lifecycle

Transfer ownership, delete your account, export everything, and close an organization while its obligations to customers and tax authorities run to the end.

An organization changes hands, people leave, and businesses close. Ownrecord handles each of these without cutting off what the organization owes its customers and tax authorities, and keeps financial records for as long as the law asks.

Transferring ownership

An organization always has at least one owner (org_owner). To hand it over, an owner offers ownership to another member with ownership_transfers.create, from Organization → Settings:

  1. The member gets an email and has 7 days to accept. One offer is open at a time; the owner can withdraw it with ownership_transfers.cancel.
  2. The member accepts from the organization's home in the console (ownership_transfers.accept).
  3. The member becomes an owner of the whole organization, and the owner who made the offer becomes an admin (org_admin).

Both sides need a sign-in within the last 15 minutes: the owner to offer, the member to accept.

Deleting your account

You can delete your own account from Your account in the console (users.delete). It:

  • removes your memberships in every organization;
  • ends your sessions and removes your Google or Microsoft sign-in links;
  • replaces your name and email address with a pseudonym, so the audit logs of the organizations you worked in still show what your account did, without your personal data.

You can sign up again later with the same address; that's a new account. While you're the only owner of an organization, the deletion is refused with last_owner: make someone else the owner, or close the organization, first.

Exporting your data

An owner can export everything in the organization at any time with organizations.export: one ZIP archive with a JSON file per kind of record (legal entities, brands, customers, subscriptions, invoices, the ledger, registrations, filings and the rest, in both modes) and the PDFs of your invoices and credit notes. Secrets, hashes and tokens are left out.

The archive is built in the background. organizations.exports.list shows when it's ready, and you download it from Organization → Settings for 7 days. Closed organizations can still export.

Closing an organization

An owner closes the organization from Organization → Settings (organizations.close), after signing in again and typing its slug:

  1. Live checkouts stop at once. New live checkout sessions are refused with organization_closing.
  2. Subscriptions end the way you choose: at the end of their current period, or immediately (your customers are told, as with any cancellation).
  3. The organization is closing until its open invoices, pending refunds and final filing periods are done. organizations.closure.get lists what's still open.
  4. Then it's closed: read-only, and still exportable. Any change is refused with organization_closed.

The final filing periods are those that began by the time the last subscription ended. Returns for later periods (for example nil returns until you deregister) remain your own obligation; deregister in each jurisdiction as its rules require.

When the organization closes, personal data that the financial records don't need is pseudonymised: customers' email addresses, names and street addresses (invoices keep their own copy of the buyer's details), waitlist entries, portal sessions, invitations and assistant conversations.

How long records are kept

Financial records are kept for the legal retention period: 10 years by default, or longer where the home country of one of your legal entities requires it. The period runs from the end of the calendar year in which the organization closed. When it ends, a retention job deletes the organization's records. What stays is the organization's ID and slug (so audit references still resolve) and the audit log.

Suspension for abuse

Ownrecord's platform admins can suspend an organization that violates the Acceptable Use Policy. A suspended organization takes no new live checkout sessions, but renewals of existing subscriptions, refunds, the customer portal and filings continue, so its customers and tax authorities aren't left without what they're owed.