Does QuickBooks Online use a QBW company file?
No. QuickBooks Online does not use a .QBW file. That extension belongs to QuickBooks Desktop, where an entire company lives in one file on a local drive. With QuickBooks Online there is no company file to find, copy, back up, or move. Your data sits on Intuit’s servers, and you reach it by signing in from any browser.
There is no company file on your computer
QuickBooks Online is a hosted product. The books, the attachments, and the audit trail sit in Intuit’s data centers, and the browser is only a window onto them. Nothing of consequence is stored on your machine.
That arrangement removes problems Desktop users know well. There is no file to lose to a failed drive and no backup to forget. Because there is only one copy, there is also no risk of opening last year’s version by mistake.
The trade-off is control. You cannot put the live books on a USB stick, hand them to an accountant as a file, or open them in Desktop. When you need a copy, you export one.
How do you switch between companies?
If your user ID has access to more than one company, you can move between them without signing out. Open the settings menu, the gear icon at the top right, and choose Switch company. Every company your ID can reach is listed there; pick one and it opens in place.
A company missing from that list usually means the sign-in is wrong, not that the data is gone. Check which user ID you used. A second email address, or an old one, will show a different set of companies. Your current user ID is shown in your Intuit account profile.
Can you delete a company and start over?
Desktop users delete a company by deleting its file. Online there is no file, so there is nothing to delete in that sense, and an active subscription’s books cannot simply be emptied from inside it. Starting over generally means creating a new company.
If the old subscription is no longer needed, cancel it from the billing section of Account and Settings, then set up a fresh company under the same user ID. Export first. Access to the live data does not last forever after a subscription ends, and keeping tax records is your responsibility. Excel exports and PDF reports made before cancellation stay on your computer whatever happens to the online account.
Moving to a new computer
Nothing needs to move. On the new machine, open a browser, go to Intuit’s QuickBooks Online sign-in page, and sign in with the same user ID and password. The company opens with every transaction intact, because it was never on the old computer to begin with.
The same applies to a new employee, a new office, or a borrowed laptop. There is no installation to run and no license number to find. If two computers appear to show different data, the cause is a different company or user ID, not an out-of-date copy.
Bringing Desktop data across
A .QBW file matters to an Online user in one situation: moving from Desktop. Intuit provides an export tool inside Desktop that packages the company for Online, and an import step on the Online side receives it. The route is well used, but it is not a perfect copy. Depending on the Desktop version and the Online plan, some history, inventory, and payroll data may not transfer cleanly. Review the results before retiring the Desktop file.
The Desktop file is the source of the move, so treat it carefully. Verify it, back it up, and keep it after the conversion, because it is the only complete record of the books as they were. If the built-in tools leave gaps, a conversion service can carry the data across in full, and that is work we do.
Keeping a local copy
The live books stay in the cloud, but you can hold copies on your own computer. The export option in the settings menu produces Excel workbooks of your reports and lists, and anything you can print can be saved as PDF. Doing this on a schedule, rather than only when a subscription is about to end, is the sensible habit.
Exports are snapshots, not working files. An Excel export cannot be opened back into QuickBooks Online as a company, and a PDF is for reading. They exist so your records survive outside the product, which is worth arranging for yourself.