The question is not whether you can get your data out. It is whether what comes out is any use. A spreadsheet of every row you ever typed is not the same as a working record of your business, and the gap between those two things is where firms get stuck. Most of what is written about this treats it as a data-protection problem. It mostly is not — it is a contract problem, and one you can settle cheaply before you sign anything.
This is what the law actually gives a company, what an export is worth, and the two tests worth running while you are still a happy customer.
A firm that had its data and could not read it
In a dispute reported by Pinsent Masons in May 2018, the software supplier Reynolds & Reynolds "applied a remote lock on the software to prevent Blade from logging into the software" after a payment dispute. Blade Motor Group held its own data on its own server. It still could not read it in any usable form without the supplier's software.
That is the shape of the problem in one sentence. Possession of the data was never the issue. The thing that made it a business is the software that turns rows into a record, and that was the part that could be switched off.
The article's contract recommendation is the one most people never think to ask for: an express provision that the supplier "may not exercise a remote lock or backdoor to prevent the customer from accessing its software and/or data".
Data protection law is not going to help you
Almost every article about getting your data back reaches for GDPR. Read the actual right and it does not do what people assume.
The ICO is explicit that the right to data portability "only applies to personal data", and only to information "an individual has provided to a controller". It is a right held by a person, about themselves.
Your lease schedule is not personal data. Neither is your rent roll, your job history, your stock, or the arithmetic somebody in your office built up over six years. A limited company asking for its own commercial records is not exercising a data-protection right at all. It is asking its supplier to honour a contract — and if the contract is silent, it is asking a favour.
Worth knowing too: the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 is often cited as though it changed this. It creates powers for the Secretary of State to make smart-data schemes by regulation. It does not, by itself, give your business a right to its records.
Meanwhile the duty to keep the records is yours
This is the join nobody makes, and it is the one that bites. A limited company must keep records for six years from the end of the last financial year they relate to.
Six years. Now consider that a subscription contract may only promise to keep your data for thirty or ninety days after you stop paying. The law puts a six-year duty on you and your supplier may owe you three months. Nothing reconciles those two numbers except you, in advance.
And treat the numbers you read with suspicion. A search engine will tell you a thirty-to-ninety-day grace period is the norm; that figure is generalised from one large vendor's published policy and is not a rule. Your supplier's answer is in your supplier's terms, and nowhere else.
What an export is actually worth
"You can export your data at any time" is the most common reassurance in software, and it is doing a lot of work. Three questions decide whether it means anything.
Does it include everything, or the columns somebody chose? Most exports are a fixed list of fields written at some point in the past. Anything added since may not be in it.
Does it include the files? Usually not. Leases, certificates, photographs and signed documents tend to live in separate storage, and an export that hands you a web address for each one is not the same as handing you the files.
Does it still work after you have cancelled? This is the one that matters most and gets asked least, because you will want it precisely when the relationship has ended.
What ours does, including what it does not
Since we are asking you to interrogate suppliers, here is ours, and it is a mixed answer.
In TenureBook, cancelling makes a workspace read-only. Nothing is deleted, ever — every row and every file stays, and reading is deliberately untouched, so you can still open it, look at your portfolio and export it after you have stopped paying. That rule is written into the database itself rather than the interface, which is the only place a rule like that is worth anything.
What it does not do: two screens have an export, not sixteen. The occupier list exports to Excel as a workbook of occupiers, their properties and your contact notes, or to JSON for every field held against them, and the introductions schedule exports to Excel. The rest of the screens do not have a button. And the files you have uploaded — leases, photographs, documents — are not inside either export.
That is not the answer we would like to give. It is the answer, and you should ask every supplier you are considering for theirs in the same shape: which screens, which fields, which files, and does it work after I have left.
Two tests, while you are still a happy customer
Both take an afternoon and both are worth more than any clause.
Run the export and open the file. Not a promise of an export, not a screenshot of the button — do it, open what comes out, and count a column you already know the answer to. This is exactly how we found two of our own importers reporting success while silently dropping a column, which we wrote about separately.
Ask what happens on the day you stop paying, and get it in writing. How long is the data kept, can you still export it, what does it cost to get a copy afterwards. If the answer is a salesperson's reassurance rather than a line in the terms, you do not have an answer.
Four things to settle before you sign
- How long your data is kept after you stop paying, in the contract, in days.
- That you can still export after cancelling — not just while you are paying.
- What the export contains: which screens, which fields, and whether the uploaded files come with it.
- That nobody can lock you out mid-dispute. This is the Blade clause, it costs nothing to ask for, and it is the one that turns a billing argument into an inconvenience rather than a crisis.
None of this is unreasonable to ask, and how a supplier answers tells you a good deal about what they will be like when something goes wrong. If you want a second pair of eyes on what a contract in front of you actually commits to, send it over.
General information, not legal advice — we build these systems, we do not practise law.