Briggs AnalyticsWhat happens to your company's data when the business closes?
In this article
What actually happens, week by weekWhat you are required to keepWhat you can license before it is goneThe order of operationsThe three mistakes that cost the mostWhat actually happens, week by week
The week the decision is made, the subscriptions are still running and everything is intact. By week two the first cancellations go through, usually the most expensive per-seat tools: the field service platform, the service desk, the LOS, the design suite. Most vendors keep a backup for 30 days, some for 90, a few for a year. Few tell you which.
By week four the admin accounts belong to people who no longer work there. By week eight the domain lapses, and with it every login that used a company email. By week twelve the vendor backups start to expire, and the record of how the company actually ran, the one thing a buyer would pay for, is gone.
What you are required to keep
This depends on your industry and your state, and nothing on this page replaces your lawyer or accountant. In general: tax records for seven years, payroll and employment records for three to seven, client files for whatever your professional rules say (law, accounting and medicine all have their own schedules), and anything under a litigation hold for as long as the hold lasts. Those obligations attach to the originals. A license is a scrubbed copy, so licensing does not touch them either way.
What you can license before it is gone
The operating record. Tickets and how they were resolved, jobs and what they cost, code and why it changed, the month-end close and its reconciliations, the internal threads where decisions were made. Buyers that specialize in closing companies publish offers of $10,000 to $300,000 for that record, any size, and the fastest buyer in the market pays within seven days of review. Customer names, personal information and anything under a restrictive contract are removed before anyone sees it, and you approve the categories first. What to export first, by industry.
See what your company's records could get.
Ten questions, under five minutes, built from the buyers' own published ranges.
Get my estimate →The order of operations
License, export, then cancel. Owners who do it the other way round call the vendor three weeks later asking for a restore, and sometimes get it. The two-minute check takes two minutes; the introduction is the same day; the specialists close in two to four weeks. Nothing in that timeline requires the company to still be operating, only the data to still exist.
The three mistakes that cost the most
Cancelling the system before exporting it. Letting the domain lapse before the exports are done, which locks every single-sign-on account at once. And assuming a small company has nothing worth licensing: the published floor is $10,000, and the question is years of history in a system, not headcount.
In short
- Cloud vendors purge data 30 to 90 days after the last payment. The people and the logins go sooner.
- Retention rules attach to the originals; a license is a scrubbed copy and does not change them.
- Shut-down specialists publish $10,000 to $300,000 for a closing company's records, any size.
- License, export, then cancel. In that order.
Questions owners ask.
We closed six months ago. Is anything left?
Sometimes. Call each vendor; a few keep backups for a year, and a re-activated account for one month often restores the export. Code hosts are the most forgiving.
Who signs if the company is dissolved?
Whoever holds the assets after dissolution, usually the former owners or the assignee. Buyers deal with this regularly and will tell you what they need.
Does licensing delay the closure?
No. The license runs alongside the wind-down and the scrubbed copy leaves after you approve the scope. Two to four weeks, start to payment.
