Exporting all your data

Your data is yours. Session gives you a single Download export button that produces one file containing everything we hold for your venue: every booking, every customer, every signed waiver, your whole timetable, your prices and your settings. There is no form to fill in, no date range to choose and nobody to ask - if you can sign in, you can take a full copy.

The export lives at the bottom of Settings → Data, directly under importing data.

screenshot · swap meThe Export data section on Settings, Data, showing a Download export button

Download your data

1. 1

   Open Settings → Data and scroll to Export data.

2. 2

   Select Download export. Nothing else to set - the file always contains everything.

3. 3

   Wait a moment while the file is built. A busy venue can take up to a minute; the button tells you it is working.

4. 4

   The file saves to your device as a .zip, named with your venue and today's date. Double-click it to open the folder inside.

What's in the file

Open the folder and you'll find four things.

csv/ - spreadsheets you can open in Excel, Numbers or Google Sheets. One row per booking, per customer, per session, per signed waiver, and so on. These are the files to hand an accountant, an insurer or a new booking system.

waivers/ - the actual wording of every waiver your customers agreed to, as plain text files. The waiver spreadsheet links each signature to the text that person signed.

json/ - one file per database table, holding every field of every record exactly as stored. This is the copy for a developer, or for another system's importer. If something isn't in the spreadsheets, it's in here.

README.md - a plain-English contents page listing every file and how many rows it has, generated from the export itself. Start here if you're not sure what you're looking at.

Your money is not in the file, and that's the point

Payments run through your own Stripe account, not ours. Your payment history, payouts, disputes, saved cards and live membership subscriptions all sit in Stripe under your control, and nothing that happens to Session touches them.

The export records what each booking was for and what it cost. Stripe remains the record of the money itself. See connecting Stripe.

Signed waivers

csv/waiver-signatures.csv is the file most worth knowing about, because it answers the question an insurer asks: who signed, when, and what did they agree to.

It covers both ways a waiver can be signed - once per booking, or once per guest - and links every row to the waiver text in waivers/. Three honest limits are worth reading before you rely on it, and they're repeated in the README:

• The signature drawing isn't in the file. Where someone drew a signature, the row says Signature captured: Yes and the record of who signed and what they agreed to is complete, but the image itself stays in Session. Ask us and we'll get it to you.
• Only the current wording of each waiver is stored. If you've edited a waiver since someone signed it, the version they agreed to no longer exists, so that row's text link is left blank rather than pointing at wording they never saw.
• For waivers signed once per booking, the session wasn't recorded against the signature. Where we can work it out from the booking, the row says Matched by pinned waiver. Treat that as strong inference rather than a record.

See waivers for how signing works day to day.

What's deliberately left out

• Security tokens and API secrets. Booking manage-links, waiver-signing links, webhook signing secrets and API keys are live credentials - anyone holding them could act on your account, so putting them in a file you'll email around would be unsafe.
• Identifiers that only mean something inside Session's own systems. They wouldn't resolve to anything outside them.
• Survey answers collected by another venue. A customer of yours who answered a different venue's community survey exports without those answers, because they aren't yours.
• Your images, for now. Logos, header images and session pictures aren't in the file yet. The json/ files record their web addresses, so save any you want to keep from your admin pages in the meantime.

Common questions

1. What happens to my data if Session shuts down? You can take a complete copy at any time, today, without asking us - that's what this page is for. Your payments are already outside our control, in your own Stripe account. We'd give notice and keep the export available if we ever wound down, but you don't have to rely on that: download a copy whenever you like and you're covered either way.

2. How is this different from the CSV exports on Reports? The Reports exports are two focused files - a bookings ledger and a session attendance report - for a date range you choose, shaped for your accountant. This is everything, for all time, in one download. The bookings and attendance files inside the export are the same shape as the ones on Reports.

3. Can I export just one location or one date range? No, and that's deliberate. The promise is "everything", and any filter brings back the question of whether you've got it all. For a narrower slice, use the Reports exports, which respect your date range and location filter.

4. Can Staff download it? No. Export is limited to Admin and Superadmin because the file contains every customer's personal details and their signed waivers.

5. Could another booking system read this? The json/ folder is a complete, structured copy designed for exactly that, and the spreadsheets cover the common cases. Whether a given system can import it depends on that system - but nothing is held back that would stop them.

6. Is the export recorded anywhere? Yes. Each download is written to your account's activity history, showing who took a copy and when.