If you stop paying next year, what happens to your quote history?

Software is easy to leave. History is not.

You can move a quoting product in a quarter. Your pricing desk will complain for six weeks and then stop. What you cannot move in a quarter is the history. Three years of what you quoted, who won it, at what price, and what your agent charged you underneath.

Picture the Tuesday morning. A customer asks for the same lane they shipped in March. Your pricing exec wants two facts before she answers: what you charged that customer last time, and whether you won it. If both facts sit behind a login you no longer have, she is quoting a stranger. She pads the number to be safe, or she loses the enquiry to somebody who did not have to guess.

The same history is what makes any suggested price worth reading. A product that proposes a number from what that customer paid before is only as good as the record behind it. Take the record away and your next product starts from nothing on the day you most need it to be clever.

So C2 is an operational question wearing a legal coat. The contract is only where the answer gets written down. What you are really asking is whether you could still price your own repeat business the month after you left.

Ask for the list row by row. “All your data” is not a list, and the gaps are always in the same places.

Read the third column again. It is the difference between an export and a photograph of one.

Two rows on that list are the ones people discover late. Attachments are where exports go thin, because they are large and awkward to package. Configuration is where exports usually stop altogether. The margin rules and routing you built are, in the supplier’s view, settings of their product rather than your data. Neither position is outrageous. Both are worth knowing in March rather than in December.

Four, and the first one is where most exits go wrong.

One. The window

Ask when the clock starts. The date you give notice, the last day of service, or the day an invoice went unpaid are three very different answers. Ask whether the account stays readable while the window runs, because an export right on a suspended login is not a right.

Two. The format

“A suitable format” is not a format. Ask for the file type by name and the fields it carries, using the table above as your list. A supplier who has done this before will tell you what is in the file without checking.

Three. The deletion

Ask what is deleted, how long it takes, whether backups are included and whether you get written confirmation. The European regulation already requires a processor contract to make them delete or return all the personal data after the end of the services, at the controller's choice (Article 28 of the General Data Protection Regulation). That rule reaches the contacts in your customer list. It does not reach your rate history, so the deletion of that has to be a term you asked for.

Four. What survives

Some clauses outlive the contract. Find out whether your export right is one of them, and what happens to it if the company is sold. This is the clause the dodge question on the sheet is aimed at.

One recent development is worth knowing about because it gives you language to borrow. The European Data Act has applied since 12 September 2025 and covers switching between data processing services. The Commission’s own page says “all providers are required to remove obstacles that their customers may face when they want to switch to another provider or use several services at the same time”, and that the regulation “will also entirely remove switching charges, including charges for data egress (i.e. charges for data transit), from 12 January 2027”. Until then, providers may still charge for the costs of switching. Whether your supplier sits inside its scope is a question for your lawyer. The useful part is the standard it describes, which you can ask for in your own contract today.

Four, and every one of them sounds fine when it is said out loud.

Trap one. A promise instead of a term

“We would never do that” describes a person, and the sheet marks it as a warning sign for good reason. People move on. Companies change hands. The contract stays. Ask for the sentence, not the sentiment.

Trap two. A photograph of your history

A folder of quote PDFs is a filing cabinet, not a history. Ask for the file a spreadsheet opens, with the lane, the date, the customer, the charge lines and the outcome in columns somebody can sort.

Trap three. The clock that starts at the wrong moment

Thirty days is generous or useless depending on when it begins and whether you can still log in. A window that opens on the day service ends, on an account that has already been closed, is a window onto nothing.

Trap four. The export nobody has ever run

Plenty of exports exist in a document and nowhere else. Ask when it was last run for a company your size. Ask how long it took. Ask whether you can watch one, even with another company’s data removed.

Run it in week two of the pilot. Nobody tests an exit in the last week and enjoys the result.

The test takes an afternoon.

• 01Export everything the pilot has produced. Note who pressed the button and how long it took.
• 02Open the file on your own machine, in whatever your pricing desk actually uses.
• 03Count the columns against the table above and write down what is missing.
• 04Give a pricing exec one real repeat enquiry and the export, and nothing else. See whether she can price it.
• 05Ask for the test file to be deleted, and see whether a confirmation arrives.

Then write down what you found, in three lines, while it is fresh. A month later you will remember that it went fine and none of the detail that made it fine.

This is the dodge question from the sheet, and it is not rude. It is the ordinary future.

Acquisition is the common case rather than the disaster. Products get bought. What follows is a harmonisation of terms at the next renewal, and that is where an export right nobody wrote down quietly disappears. A right written into your order form travels with the contract. An assurance from a founder does not.

Closure is the harder one, and three plain questions cover it. Who holds the data. Who pays the hosting bill in that scenario. Whether anybody outside the company can hand you a copy. A standing export you run yourself answers all three without anybody having to predict the future.

That is the honest conclusion of this whole page. Whatever the contract says, take a copy every quarter and keep it where you keep your other records. It costs an hour. It ends the argument before it starts, and it works no matter who owns the supplier next year.

Put C2 to the software you have now, too. If it went dark this month, what could you still price from? Most forwarders find the answer is a shared drive and one person’s memory. That is worth fixing whether or not you buy anything, and it is a fair thing to put to us as well.