Docs / Basics

Your data

The full download, and what happens when OrderDen support signs in as you.

Everything in your workspace is yours, and OrderDen is built so you can take all of it whenever you want — not just the parts we find convenient to hand over.

While OrderDen is pre-release, this is not optional. There is no guarantee that your data will be preserved — it may be lost, reset or migrated without notice. Take a full download of anything that matters and keep it somewhere we do not control. See Pre-release: what to expect.

Open Company Settings → Your data.

Full download

One button. One .zip. Everything.

CSV spreadsheets of every list — clients, items, quotes, orders, invoices, payments, vendors, purchases — including archived and inactive records. Open them in Excel, Sheets or Numbers, or import them somewhere else.
JSON records with everything a spreadsheet flattens away: line items and their discounts, the tax charged per rate, shipments and tracking numbers, payments and what each one was allocated to, refunds and credit notes, contacts and addresses, recipes, bins and the whole stock ledger, your settings, and the full activity trail. One file per kind, written in the order they have to go back in.
Every uploaded file, exactly as it was uploaded, filed under the record it belongs to, with an index.json mapping each file back to its record.
A README and a manifest describing what is in the archive and when it was taken.

Money is written as decimal strings so nothing is lost to rounding, and dates are ISO-8601 in UTC.

What is not in it

Credentials and live connections to the outside world, rather than records of your business:

Secrets — your SMTP password and your API keys. An API key is only ever shown once, and it never leaves the database.
Webhook endpoints and email settings — addresses pointing at other people's systems.
Recurring invoice schedules and saved cards — standing instructions to charge somebody, held with your payment provider. The invoices a schedule has already raised are in the archive; the schedule is set up again.
Client portal accounts — other people's logins.
Teammates and their permissions, and each person's own saved views, columns and dashboard layout.

Everything else about your workspace is in the archive, and manifest.json lists it all — what is in there, what can be loaded back, and what cannot.

How often

Once every 30 days. Building the archive reads every record and every file, so it is deliberately spaced out. Company Settings → Your data always shows the three things you need to plan around it: the cadence, when it was last used, and when the next one is available — "Available now" when the button is live. In between, every list still exports to CSV instantly from its own page, and the API can read anything at any time. The API's /export endpoint shares the same 30-day allowance as the button.

Putting it back

The same zip loads back in. Company Settings → Your data → Restore from an archive: choose the file, press Check this archive, and you get a table of what it holds and what it would add — kind by kind, before anything is written. The button that writes appears after that.

It works two ways. Into an empty workspace it rebuilds the one the archive came from: the same clients, the same item numbers, the same invoice numbers, totals, dates and statuses, the same payments on the same days and against the same invoices, the same shelf. Into a working workspace it fills in what is missing and leaves alone what is not — a record is recognised by what you would recognise it by (a client's name, an invoice's number, a line's position on its document), so nothing is duplicated and nothing already there is overwritten. Loading the same archive twice changes nothing the second time.

Records come back exactly as they were rather than being re-created: an invoice keeps its number and its total instead of being re-priced against today's catalog, and a payment lands on the day the money arrived. Numbering is raised to whichever is higher, so a restored invoice can never be followed by a new one reusing its number, and your settings are only written into a workspace that has none — a restore will not replace the letterhead you set up this morning.

Two things are read and deliberately not written back, and the check tells you so:

The activity trail. It is a record of what happened here, written as it happens. Loading someone else's entries into it would make it something you can compose rather than something you can trust. The restore writes its own line saying what it did, and appears in your import history.
Share links. A share link is a secret in a URL with an expiry and a view count on it. Restoring one would revive a link somebody was handed — and possibly had taken away — somewhere else. Share the document again and you get a fresh link.

A restore cannot be undone in one press: it writes records of every kind at once, and by the time you look, some of them are on documents. That is what Check this archive is for.

What comes back, and what does not

Everything OrderDen exports either imports back or says why it cannot. There is no third answer:

What you export	How it comes back
Clients	Clients import	Carries the whole address book, so the file goes back in as the address book rather than as a column of names
Items and Materials	Items or Materials import	Stock balances come back through Opening stock or the archive: a shelf is a ledger, not a column
Invoices	Invoices import	The total, the dates, what was paid and when and how, and the status. The lines behind the total need the archive
Payments	Payments import	Including Allocated to, so one transfer that cleared three invoices comes back as one payment against three
Vendors	Vendors import	Column for column
Inventory	Opening stock import	On hand becomes a counted balance, so a corrected count books the difference rather than doubling the shelf
Expenses	Expenses import	Column for column
Quotes, Orders, Purchases, Credit notes	The full archive	A list row is a total; the document is its lines. Reading the row back would make a document with a total and nothing in it, which is worse than not reading it back
Projects, Stock movements	The full archive	Both are containers for records that already exist, and a ledger that disagreed with the documents behind it would be worse than no ledger
Spending	Nothing, on purpose	It is a view over purchases and expenses — every row already belongs to one of them, so importing it would book each spend twice
Reports	Nothing, on purpose	A report is worked out from records that are already here. Load the records and the report follows
Accounting export	Nothing, on purpose	Files in the shapes QuickBooks and Xero read. Reading one back would book the same period twice
The archive of a files clear-out	Nothing, on purpose	Loading it back would undo a purge somebody deliberately ran. Download it and keep it

Why we do this

Plenty of tools make it easy to put your business in and quietly hard to get it back out — import wizards everywhere, export options nowhere. We would rather you stayed with OrderDen because it earns its place each month, not because leaving would cost you everything you have typed in.

So the door is open both ways: import a spreadsheet on day one, take everything with you any day after, and use the API for everything in between.

Clearing out old files

Attachments are the one part of a workspace that grows without anybody deciding it should: photographs of purchase orders, scans of delivery notes, receipt pictures taken on a phone. Four years in, they are almost all of what the workspace is storing, and almost none of what it looks at.

Company Settings → Your data → Clear out old files removes them, in two steps and without touching a single record.

Pick a date and press See what this would remove. You get the count, the total size, and the range the files were uploaded across. Nothing has changed.
Export and remove. Every file in scope is packaged into one .zip with a manifest.json saying what each was attached to. The archive is written and read back before anything is deleted — if it cannot be written, the clear-out stops and you still have everything.

Only the files go. The client, quote, order, invoice, purchase, expense or project each was attached to is untouched: an invoice is a tax record and stays exactly where it is, along with its numbers, its history and its activity trail — which also records the clear-out. The paperclip beside it is simply empty.

Two kinds of file are never purged, whatever date you pick:

Catalog item photographs — those are what the item list and the product page show today, not old paperwork.
Your logo — it is on every document you send.

Then delete the archive

Until you do, the clear-out has moved the files rather than removed them: the archive is sitting in the same storage the attachments were. Download it, put it somewhere that is not OrderDen — a drive, a backup, wherever your accounts live — and then use Delete archive. That is the step that actually gives the space back.

The archive is kept for 90 days, then deleted for good. It is the undo window for a clear-out that has none otherwise: if you picked the wrong date, that is how long you have to notice and get the files back out. After 90 days it is deleted automatically and the clear-out is final — the row stays in Past clear-outs and reads Archive deleted, so you can still see what was removed and when. Download the archive if you want to keep the files; do not treat it as long-term storage.

The date has to be at least 30 days ago, and one run packages at most 5,000 files or 512 MB, whichever comes first. For a bigger clear-out, work backwards: an early date first, then another run for the rest.

How big can a file be

Any single upload is capped at 10 MB, and photographs are shrunk automatically on the way in — capped at 2,000 pixels on the long edge and re-encoded, which typically takes a phone snap of an A4 page from 4 MB to under half a megabyte with nothing visible lost. The file keeps its name and its format: a .jpg stays a JPEG. PDFs and everything that is not a photograph are stored exactly as they arrived.

There is also a cap on how many files a workspace uploads in an hour. It sits far above anything a person does and exists to catch a script in a loop; if you hit it during a genuine bulk import, spread the import over a few hours or ask whoever runs your OrderDen server to raise it.

The other ways out

A single list — the Export button on any list page downloads the current filtered view as CSV, with exactly the columns you have showing.
Reports — every report exports to CSV from its own page.
The API — GET /api/v1/export returns the same full archive for a script, and ?check=1 reports whether one is available yet. Every record type also has its own endpoints, and /api/v1/attachment-purges runs a clear-out. See the API reference.

Coming in

The import wizard takes nine kinds of record from CSV files — your own price list, a materials tab, a shelf count, last quarter's invoices paid and unpaid, the payments against them and a bank export. Same principle, opposite direction: it maps your columns rather than demanding a particular shape, shows you what it read before it writes anything, and undoes a whole run with one button. A list you exported from OrderDen needs no mapping at all — the headings are the ones OrderDen wrote.

Importing is also how most workspaces end up with the same customer twice, which is why the Clients list has a Find duplicates panel that merges them back into one without losing a document.

When support signs in as you

If you ask us for help with something we cannot see from the outside, an OrderDen support engineer can open your account the way you see it. You will know when it happens, because it is impossible to hide:

We work in a separate system. OrderDen staff have their own logins in their own internal tool. Nobody at OrderDen has an account inside your workspace, and no OrderDen account — yours or a colleague's — can be turned into a staff one.
A banner is pinned to every page for the whole session, saying it is an OrderDen support session and who it is signed in as.
It ends on its own after an hour, and immediately when the engineer stops.
It is recorded. Every support sign-in is logged on our side with who did it and when. Ask us and we will tell you.

A support session acts as you, so anything done in it shows in your activity history under your name — another place to check afterwards.

Everything on this page is in the free tier — one person, the whole product, no card.

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