Features
Cloud Storage Connectivity (Optional)
‘Belts and Braces’ optional Sync to send another copy of your backups from our servers to any of the four major cloud storage providers that we support…
- Dropbox
- GoogleDrive
- OneDrive
- Box
Unlimited Historical Data
We allow you to see and download all available data on an ongoing basis i.e. you have unlimited access to any of your old backups, as far back as your first backup.
Unrestricted Data Export
We offer several open data formats – such as XML, XSLX or CSV, which can be viewed using Microsoft Excel or Access or any other application that supports these formats.
Windows Agent
Our custom built Windows app ‘controlv’ can automatically download all your data nightly to your local infrastructure , no need to login to our portal and manually download the datasets or attachments.
Reseller Portal
Reseller’s can manage all their client accounts through our purpose built portal. We can bill your clients directly and pay you a commission or we can invoice you. Contact us for further details.
Full Off-line Access to your Data
Interact with your Xero data offline. Using our FREE application ‘backapp’, you are able to EASILY view, search export and report on any of the data backed up from Xero. You do not have to be online to view the data, simply download the dataset and import into backapp and you are good to go.
Local Storage - GDPR compliant
We store the data in geo-separate secure data centres in New Zealand, but using any of the four major cloud storage providers that we support, you can sync your data to a local on-premise site of your choice. For those that do not wish to use third party cloud storage providers or want to comply with local laws like GDPR compliance, we also offer the ability to replicate directly to you local infrastructure.
Availability 24/7
Our On-Demand download allows you to get the latest data when you need it. You may download any backup from your history for you to store or work with using our FREE application called ‘backapp’ or you can choose any application that can import XML or CSV.
Timezone Based Backup
Based on your timezone, the backup runs at 7pm local time.
Getting Started
Please take a look at our video clips below for further information.
If you need assistance to get up and running or any other queries on how to do things, please contact us info@control-c.com and we will provide you with the required information or custom video.
Setting up a free trial
Inside BACKAPP – Importing Data
Manage Daily Report Frequency
Configuring Cloud Storage
Manage your backups and accounts
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![Portal Login](https://i0.wp.com/www.control-c.com/wp-content/uploads/Portal-Login.png?resize=484%2C635&ssl=1)
Our portal to Your backed up Xero data.
Our portal to the backup servers bring you realtime backup status reports, a dashboard showing the overall status of your organisations backups and ability to view your Xero data online and download for use locally. The portal is the control room of your subscription with Control-C.
History
Control-C was conceived in 2011, after realising that Xero did not offer the ability to backup ‘our’ precious financial data.
At the time we were operating a backup and disaster recovery service and this situation clearly contradicted the solutions that we sold to our clients as a business.
Incorporated in 2014, after trialing our new service for a year with a large Xero Platinum Partner, who also recognised the risk to them as business advisors, our mandate became clear – we wanted to empower the owner of their valuable financial data stored in Xero, a means to repatriate their data back to a location of their choosing.
We believe that users should have uninhibited access to all of their data stored in ‘the cloud’, Xero became our focus.
Xero Partners
As a ‘Xero Partner’, and your clients ‘Financial and Business Advisors’, you should be aware of your client’s tax compliance obligations (data sovereinty) by ensuring their data is backed up, and held within their country, if required.
Many Accountants use Control-C on behalf of their clients as an in-house solution for piece of mind, ensuring data integrity and to meet various local tax law or legal obligations. While others use Control-C as a value-add service, offering incremental revenue and a near data-insurance solution. Some use Control-C for both.
End Users
If you are an end-user of Xero, please try our service through the free trial that we offer or ask your accountant to contact us and receive a discounted monthly rate.
FAQ’s
You are sent a daily email (unless you turn this off or modify the frequency) that gives you a status report of the backup.
To keep down your costs to use our service, Control-C do not monitor your backups. If you would like us to monitor and manage your backups, please message us and we can provide you with a quote for the monthly service.
Your very first backup is a full backup and therefore this will take the longest time to run compared to your subsequent daily backups. Once your first back is complete though, your daily backups should complete within a couple of hours i.e. daily.
There is really no easy way to calculate how long the first backup will take as it comes down to quite a few factors, just like how long will it take to sail from A to B? Some Xero organisations have taken a couple of weeks, some even longer, but most small Xero organisations complete within a couple of days.
Factors to consider are how many records do you have in each Xero table of accounts, there are more than a dozen tables, for example your Receivables and Payables, your Bank Accounts and your Customers and Suppliers etc. If you are using Xero’s ability to store attachments, you are also going to need to allow time to back these up.
If you think your first backup is taking way too long, then you should contact us at support.controlc.co.nz and we will look into it for you and let you know its progress.
Hope that helps.
While your data is safe in “the cloud”, we all know the unforeseen can happen, and we all know we should have a secure copy of our precious data somewhere.
Tax Departments, business advisors, IT professionals all recognise that a data backup is good business practice and in most countries a tax compliance requirement.
We store your data securely in New Zealand based data centres. With Control-C you can download any of your data at any time. You can also have access to attachments that have been stored in Xero.
Basically, we give you the tool to help meet these requirements, plus the ability to browse, search, print and export your data independent of Xero. But ultimately, peace of mind.
Whilst Control-C stores your data in New Zealand data centre, we do offer other options to address ‘Data Sovereignty’.
- Support four major third party Cloud Storage providers – Box, GoogleDrive, OneDrive and DropBox (allows you to sync to your local drive)
- Control-C custom Windows sync tool that replicates directly to your servers from ours.
- In country hosting
- Private hosting
Please contact us if you would like to learn more about any of these options.
When using controlc ltd, you are dealing directly with a 100% New Zealand owned company. We are here to serve you and make sure you have uninhibited access to ‘your’ data.
We have a phone line that you can call as well as online chat available and are more than happy to meet people in person should the need arise. We have an open door policy and do not hide behind an ’email only’ contact.
Unless you are using our In-Country or Privately hosted services, your data is held in two secure commercial data centres, the primary is based in Wellington and the secondary data centre in Auckland. Both data centres employ backup power supplies, redundant data communications connections, environmental controls (e.g., air conditioning, fire suppression) and various security features such as ‘biometrics’ and ‘mantraps’ with 24/7 monitoring.
- Firstly subscribe to the FREE 14 day trial.
- Once Subscribed you will be guided to add a Xero organisation to be backed up. NOTE: You can add as many Xero Organisations as you like. Watch this video.
- Wait for your first backup to complete. This may take only one night to backup depending on your amount of data. Some Xero Organisations could take up to a week to backup, depending on the amount of attachments they have. If you think it is taking a long time, please let us know and we will investigate.
- Once complete, please login and download your successful backup to your local device. Watch this video.
- Download backapp to view and search your backed up Xero data file. Watch this video.
Any question, please email us. We are here to help.
Apart from being the only product on the market of its kind and very good value for money, here’s some other great things about Control-C and backapp :
- We backup your data every 24hrs
- Your data can be downloaded to your office directly i.e. not via email – which has size limitations
- We can synchronise your data to four major Cloud Storage providers – DropBox, GoogleDrive, Box and OneDrive(business)
- We enable you to see ALL data made available to us, by Xero, on an ongoing basis
- We backup any attachments added to an invoice at the time of creation
- All historical backups are saved in the cloud for easy access anytime in the future
- We offer several data formats (such as XML, XSLX or CSV)
- We provide a FREE Windows and OSX utility called ‘backapp’, which allows you to easily browse, search and report on any of the data transferred from Xero
- We can store the data in a data centre local to you, or directly to your infrastructure.
Control-C backs up all possible data from Xero and makes that available to you in an offline method that is very usable and viewable on any device (Mac or PC)
What we provide, is the ability to view your data from any previous day, such as invoices, expenses, balances (creditors/debtors etc), reports, attachments associated to these records.
We also integrate with third party Cloud Storage providers – which can then sync your data back to your own PC/Servers. This gives you the highest-level redundancy and access to your data anytime and anywhere.
Read our full terms and conditions and privacy policy by clicking at the foot of the page.
Xero do not facilitate the ability to perform a full restore. Nobody can restore 100% of your backed up data to Xero.
If someone says they can restore data to Xero, then eye them very suspiciously. There are considerable limitations in what is possible, and any attempt to restore leaves many holes in the data.
We can get your financial records accessible to you in less than an hour, unlike other service providers that claim that they can restore.
One company touts that they are the only ‘Xero restore service’. There is a good reason why nobody else offers this service, it is not possible! We collaborated with our users and performed tests using their restore service – most small restores took DAYS, bigger restores took a COUPLE OF WEEKS and NEVER FINISHED.
This same company DOES NOT backup your JOURNAL let alone restore it OR any of your reconciliations NOR verify restored data for multi-currency organisations.
Can your business be without your financial records for days or weeks? Check out our product, backapp. We can present your backed up data reconstituted through backapp, a purpose built application.
We have spent a considerable amount of time exploring the ability to restore data to Xero, and yes we can restore data, but just not enough to honestly say we can ‘Restore to Xero’. Our view is, that having so many gaps in a restore, and so many limitations on what can currently be restored means that a partial restore actually has little value to a business or accountant. To say otherwise is a play on words and simply misleading to unsuspecting Xero users.
We work with thousands of businesses and accountants around the world, and what they value is clear access to accurate data, the ability to get the chart of accounts back into a new Xero organisation or other package, import (or enter) opening balances as of a certain date and get a business trading again.
Due to the current limitation of Xero’s API and not being able to suitably return all data to Xero, we have currently decided not to offer any form of restoring. It may also be, that the reason for needing to restore isn’t to get your company running again in Xero – it could be that Xero is down for an extended time – the requirement is to get your business trading again, perhaps in another platform.
Control-C is the only Xero backup provider offering usable visibility to the data to make accurate business continuity possible. We backup your complete Journal, unlike some competitors. Most accountants and auditors will understand the importance of the Journal.
So, in summary: Due to API limitations, we believe no one can accurately or completely restore data to Xero, however we do provide the next best alternative.
Security
Security operations: What kind of security processes and practices have we implemented operationally to maintain the security of our platform?
OPSEC – Operational Security
Here at Control-C we adhere to the best practices of OPSEC. This risk management process encourages us to consider the operations from the perspective of an adversary, in order to protect your sensitive information from falling into the wrong hands.
Encryption: is data encrypted at rest, including backups?
We employ Microsoft’s Transparent Data Encryption. This is designed to protect data at rest by encrypting the physical data files. This level of protection prevents the data and backup files from being opened in a text editor to expose the file’s contents.
TDE encryption occurs prior to writing data to disk, and the data is decrypted when it is queried and recalled into memory.
How do we manage and store keys?
Client generated access token’s and refresh token’s are stored in our secure database.
Auditing: Is there an audit log that tracks all user actions, including read only events?
As of now, we have audit logs of any transactions of an organisation from Xero, user logins, user downloads, user deletion of an organisation, user deletion of their account, cloud storage transaction logs and organisation backup logs
Monitoring/Alerting: What kind of capabilities does our system detect and does it send alerts for security events?
We have two levels of security, Admin and User login. The User login privileges are restricted to read only of the assigned organisations by an admin user. We do not monitor user access or activity, but we do record specific events in an audit log e.g logins, downloads, deletions etc, however we are looking to send email alerts for Admin logins and audit reports of general daily user activity (opt in feature). At present we do send emails for system issues and organisation disconnections.
Authentication: Do we support MFA and/or SSO.
We support MFA but not SSO as of now. We are however planning to support Google SSO in the future.
Access control: what kind of access control is built into the our portal?
Our system employs a three stage authentication process, the two stages, two-factor authentication (including 256bit encryption) and for the third stage, we then verify the login credentials separately through our purpose built custom gatekeeper, before returning any client data. ‘Belts and Braces’
Our Software Suite
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![backapp_logo_grey](https://i0.wp.com/www.control-c.com/wp-content/uploads/backapp_logo_grey.png?resize=900%2C218&ssl=1)
View your Xero data
Purpose built by Control-C, for OSX or Windows users. Backapp allows you to open your backed up Xero data and view, filter, search and export.
This software is available FREE to all subscribers and never expires so you may keep using it if you no longer need to backup your Xero data.
![ControlV logo grey](https://i0.wp.com/www.control-c.com/wp-content/uploads/ControlV-logo-grey-1.png?resize=928%2C227&ssl=1)
Automated Sync Agent
Purpose built by Control-V, Windows users that would like an automated download of their backed up data to their local server or PC. Control-V is an alternative to using our supported cloud storage vendors to replicate the data backed up daily by our servers directly and autonomously to your local on-premise hardware for compliance reasons or simply convenience.
![](https://i0.wp.com/control-c.com/wp-content/uploads/controlv-console.png?fit=913%2C802&ssl=1)
![](https://i0.wp.com/control-c.com/wp-content/uploads/controlv-login.png?fit=472%2C382&ssl=1)
![](https://i0.wp.com/control-c.com/wp-content/uploads/controlv-api-key.png?fit=1413%2C782&ssl=1)
This software is available FREE to all subscribers.
![ControlC API logo grey](https://i0.wp.com/www.control-c.com/wp-content/uploads/ControlC-API-logo-grey-1024x226.png?resize=1024%2C226&ssl=1)
Interface to our API
Purpose built by Control-C, integrate with our API to extract your data from our servers.
This software is available for an additional fee. Please contact us to discuss pricing or other queries related to our API.