What's actually going on
The cancellation page is open in one tab. Seven years of invoices sit in the other.
Nobody has told you which one survives.
This is a normal thing to wonder about halfway through a move, and it has a plain answer. You don't need to understand MYOB's internals to get it right.
Your invoices, payments and reports feel like your data, sitting there whether you're paying or not.
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 its copy of your file. That is true of most cloud accounting software, not one product.
MYOB's own cancellation guidance tells customers, before they cancel, to "export any information" they need. It also says to download any documents saved in their In Tray (MYOB: Cancelling an AccountRight company file subscription).
That instruction exists for a reason. Access afterwards may not stay the way it is now.
The exact terms, whether it's read-only and for how long, can depend on your product and plan. Check that page for your own case rather than assuming.
So 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 is usually:
- Customer and supplier lists
- Full sales and purchases registers: invoice numbers, dates, amounts, paid or not
- General ledger detail for the last five years, to meet the ATO's record-keeping rule; keep any other years 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 them as plain files, spreadsheets and PDFs, in a dated folder outside the software. Add 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 aren't sure the export is complete. The safest form of access after cancelling is not cancelling yet.
Clean your habits either way. If you don't already export your registers and back the file up periodically, start now, not because of this migration.
Connect isn't the option here. This is a one-off handover, not an ongoing integration problem.
Convert is what the move itself is. The part worth getting right isn't the new software. It's whether the old system's history survives in a form you can search later, which is what the export list above is for.
What "done" looks like
Pick an invoice at random from a year ago. Answer "what was this, and was it paid?" using only your exports, with MYOB closed.
If you can, you're ready to cancel.
If you can't, that's the gap to close first, and it's a much smaller job while you still have the login.
The login is the part that expires. The exports are yours.