Every step below happens in plain sight. Nothing is hidden, and you can stop at any point — your original file is never modified.
Your file is encrypted and you cannot open it — because the administrator password is lost or unknown to you. You send us the file as it is. We do not need and do not want your data extracted anywhere.
Your file is copied first. Everything we do from this point happens to that copy. The file you sent us is never modified — not even briefly.
A specialist password tool opens the copy and replaces the administrator password with a new one that we generate. This does not remove the password. It swaps one administrator password for another, so the file becomes openable.
Your invoices, payments, customers, suppliers, accounts, VAT and reports are not read, altered, converted or reformatted. The tool changes the password keys and nothing else.
Before sending anything back, we compare your original against the processed copy byte for byte, so we can show you precisely how many bytes were touched.
Both files are emailed to you at the same download link, together with your new administrator password:
—your_unlocked.qbw — the file with the new
administrator password. This is the one you open.
—your_original_as_sent.qbw — your file
exactly as you uploaded it, byte for byte identical, password unchanged.
We keep your original because many people do not have a backup. If the unlocked file does not open, or something goes wrong while you are working on it, your original is still exactly where it started. Please keep a copy somewhere safe once you have downloaded it.
The link stays live for 7 days. After that both files are deleted from our systems.
That is 0.0009% of the file. Every invoice, payment, customer record and account balance came through byte for byte identical. An 88 MB file tested the same day gave the same result: 1,969 bytes, 0.0022%.
| Your data | What happens to it |
|---|---|
| Administrator password | Replaced with a new one we send you. |
| Invoices & invoice lines | Untouched. Opens exactly as before. |
| Payments & deposits | Untouched. |
| Bank transactions & bank feeds | Untouched. Your whole banking history stays as it is. |
| Journal entries & manual journals | Untouched, including any year-end adjustments. |
| Customers & suppliers | Untouched. |
| Customer & supplier notes, addresses, terms | Untouched. Every note and comment stays exactly as you wrote it. |
| Chart of accounts & VAT | Untouched. |
| Receipts, attachments & scanned documents | Untouched. |
| Recurring transactions, budgets & reminders | Untouched. |
| Payroll data | Untouched, if your file contains payroll. |
| Reports & history | Untouched. Every past report still builds from the same data. |
| Reconciliations | Untouched. |
| Your file format / version | Untouched. It stays the version you sent. |
| Stored card numbers, tax IDs, bank details |
Behind a separate, deeper encryption. We check each file and tell you whether it opens for you. |
In short: everything is untouched except the password. No row above is a guess about what we expect to find — each one is the result of a byte-for-byte comparison of your actual file against the actual processed copy. Anything that was not the password keys did not change.
Enter the new administrator password we emailed you. The file opens as a normal QuickBooks company file. You keep using QuickBooks exactly as you did before.
File → Utilities → Rebuild Data.
QuickBooks may also warn you that other users need password changes. That is normal and expected after an administrator password is replaced — those users are asked to choose a new password, and nothing is removed from their accounts.
QuickBooks may then ask whether other applications should be allowed to access the company file through ODBC (the connection Windows tools use to read QuickBooks data). Click “Yes” to that question. Rebuild needs it to repair the encrypted fields, and without it the rebuild will not finish properly.
File → Utilities → Verify Data. This checks the file after the rebuild. If it reports nothing, your file is clean.
Think of your .qbw file as a bank. We give you the keys to the bank
and all its filing cabinets, so every invoice, payment, customer and
report opens up.
However, the bank also has a vault. The crown jewels — card
numbers, SSNs, tax IDs, bank details — sit in that vault, under a
different key, and the bank door key does not open it. Your everyday accounting records are unaffected, and you can access them as normal.
While we work on your file, we assess whether the secondary encryption layer opens under the new administrator password. That is part of QuickBooks' own security architecture: the layer sits under a separate key that the administrator password does not control, and whether it opens depends on your file, not on us giving up. We put the answer in the email that carries your download link.
Separately, here is the step you take on your own computer. You open the file we send you, and QuickBooks will prompt you to change the administrator password again. That is normal and expected, and it is not a second charge — that password change is what re-encrypts your file.
Once you set it, QuickBooks normally runs File Doctor automatically. This repairs the file so it opens cleanly — it is worth doing regardless of the vault. You do not have to launch anything yourself. Rebuild repairs the file so it opens cleanly, whether or not the vault comes back.
If the vault is still locked after that automatic process, then you run File Doctor by hand: Tool Hub → Company File Issues → Run QuickBooks File Doctor, then enter your new administrator password. It rebuilds the keys where it can.
We can open the bank and all its filing cabinets. The vault is a separate matter, and it does not have the same answer on every file: on some files the secondary encryption layer opens under the new password and those fields read back normally, on some files it does not. We test your file and tell you which case it is — we would rather say so plainly than let you find out later.
Where the vault does open, those fields read back normally in QuickBooks. Where it does not, that data stays encrypted until the original password is known. Some very old records were already unreadable before anyone touched the file, and those stay unreadable; that is not damage we caused.