What's actually going on
This is a completely normal thing to wonder about, and it has a plain, non-technical answer — you don't need to understand MYOB's internals to get this right. It feels like your invoices, payments, and reports are simply "your data," sitting there whether you're paying or not. But in a subscription product, the software and your access to it are the same thing you're paying for. Once you stop paying, the vendor decides what happens to your copy of the file — and that's true of most cloud accounting software, not just one product.
MYOB's own cancellation guidance tells customers, before they cancel, to "export any information" they need and to download any documents saved in their In Tray (MYOB: Cancelling an AccountRight company file subscription). That instruction exists because access afterwards isn't guaranteed to stay the way it was — the exact terms (whether it's read-only, and for how long) can depend on your product and plan, so check that page for your specific case rather than assuming.
The safe assumption is: once you cancel, treat ongoing access as a bonus, not a plan.
The smallest fix you can do today
Before you cancel anything, export what you'd actually go looking for later. That's usually:
- Customer and supplier lists
- Full sales and purchases registers — invoice numbers, dates, amounts, paid or not
- General ledger detail for every financial year you might need again
- Aged receivables and payables as at your changeover date
- PDFs of any invoices you might need to re-send to a customer
- Anything sitting in your In Tray, per MYOB's own advice above
Save these as plain files — spreadsheets and PDFs — in a dated folder outside the software, plus a full company file backup if your version offers one. This takes an afternoon, not a project.
When it's worth keeping, cleaning, connecting, or converting
Keep MYOB running a little longer if you're not sure you've exported everything — the safest form of "access after cancelling" is simply not cancelling until the export is done and checked.
Clean your habits now regardless of whether you're leaving: if you don't already export your registers and back up your file periodically, start before this migration, not because of it.
Connect isn't really the option here — this is a one-off handover, not an ongoing integration problem.
Convert is what you're already doing by moving to a new system. The part worth getting right isn't the new software, it's making sure the old system's history survives the move in a form you can actually search later — which is what the export list above is for.
What "done" looks like
Done means you can answer "what was this invoice, and was it paid?" for any old transaction without opening MYOB at all. Test it before you cancel: pick an invoice at random from a year ago and try to answer that question using only your exports. If you can, you're genuinely ready to cancel. If you can't, that's the gap to close first — not a support ticket to chase after the fact.