Resources / Records, Audits & Public Accountability / Records retention

What happens to your records if you switch vendors?

The short answer

When a district or agency moves its forms and approvals into any digital system, the records it creates live somewhere outside the office's own filing cabinet, which raises a real question: what happens to that data if the office ever switches systems. Some vendors make that answer hard to find, because getting it out cleanly isn't in their interest, and it often only surfaces in a services agreement nobody reads until they need it. An office that doesn't know the answer in advance is negotiating from a position of dependency, discovering the terms only at the moment it has the least leverage. Doing it well means the answer is simple enough to state plainly before anyone signs anything: the records stay retrievable for as long as the relationship lasts, and the office can get all of it out whenever it wants.

On this page

Why this question is harder to get a straight answer to than it should be How offices usually find out Where it becomes a real problem

What doing it well actually requires Common questions How Flow Forms handles it

Why this question is harder to get a straight answer to than it should be

Most offices don't get a straight answer to this question because it isn't usually where they'd think to look for it. It lives in a services agreement, a data processing addendum, or a support ticket answered case by case, not in anything a business manager or IT director sees during evaluation. That's not usually because anyone's trying to hide it. It's just not a question that gets a plain answer up front, because a plain answer sometimes reveals more friction than an evaluation conversation wants to admit.

How offices usually find out

In practice, most offices find out what actually happens to their data the same way they find out what a services contract really covers: by asking directly, late in the process, or by running into it after they've already signed. Some don't find out until they're actually trying to leave, which is the worst possible time to discover the answer is complicated.

Where it becomes a real problem

It becomes a real problem the moment an office actually needs to leave, whether that's a budget decision, a change in leadership, or simply outgrowing a system. If getting the data out means a manual request, a fee, a delay, or a format nobody can actually use, the office discovers the switching cost was never really about the new system. It was about how hard the old one made it to walk away.

What doing it well actually requires

A straightforward answer to this question has two parts, and a third that makes the first two actually usable.

Records stay accessible for as long as the relationship lasts

An office's data is retrievable the entire time it's a Flow Forms client, not archived somewhere out of reach or handed over only at the end of a contract term.

The full export is available any time, not just at the end

A complete export can be pulled whenever an office wants one, whether that's a routine backup, an audit, or because the office is evaluating other options. It isn't a leaving-only feature.

What comes out is the complete record, not a summary

The same history behind every submission, who did what and when, exports along with the data itself, in a standard file format. Leaving doesn't mean walking away with a stripped-down copy. It means walking away with the same record the office had access to the whole time.

Common questions

Questions we hear from every office weighing what happens if they ever need to leave.

Does this mean Flow Forms owns our data?

No. The office's data is the office's data the entire time. What "for as long as you're a client" describes is where it's stored and accessible, not who it belongs to.

Is the exported data locked into a Flow Forms-specific format, or something we can actually use elsewhere?

It exports as a standard file, the same format used for an audit or a records request, not something proprietary that only Flow Forms can open.

Does keeping data "for as long as you're a client" satisfy our state's records retention requirements?

Not on its own. Retention requirements are set by state law and vary by record type. What this describes is what happens to the data while the relationship with Flow Forms is active. Meeting a specific retention schedule is the office's own policy decision, layered on top of that.

Can we get a full export without leaving, just to have a copy?

Yes. The full export isn't a leaving-only feature. It's available any time the office wants a copy, whether that's for a backup, an audit, or because you're evaluating other options.

How Flow Forms handles it

Records created in Flow Forms stay accessible for as long as an office is a client, and the full history behind them, not just the raw data, can be exported at any time, including the day an office decides to leave. It's the same standard export used for an audit or a records request, not a proprietary format that locks anything in.

See how it would work for your office →