Your customer list isn't always yours

The customer list is the most valuable thing a small merchant builds over the years. Not the stock, which can be bought again: the list of who has already bought, what they usually take, and how to reach them.

While everything works, nobody asks whose it is. The question arrives at three precise moments, and it always arrives late.

The three moments when you ask

When you stop paying. The free plan gets tight, or the subscription no longer makes sense. What happens to the list? In many services it becomes read-only, or locks entirely after a grace period.

When the supplier shuts down. It happens, and it happens to small products most of all. There is usually notice, but it is weeks, and it arrives while you are working.

When you want to switch. Here the problem is not getting the data: it is what shape it comes in. A list exported without the purchase history is a phone book, not a customer record.

What to ask first, not afterwards

Three questions, and it is worth asking them while choosing, when the answer costs nothing:

• Can I export everything, and in what format? A file other programs can read, or just a PDF to look at?
• Does the history come out with the names? Who bought what and when is the part that has value.
• What stays with them after I leave? And for how long?

If one of those three answers is «it depends», that is already an answer.

A list you can look at but not take away is not yours: it is on loan.

The difference between «accessible» and «yours»

The two words get used as synonyms and they are not. Accessible means you can reach it while the service exists and while you are paid up. Yours means you have it in hand even if the service is gone tomorrow.

It is the same difference as between keeping your savings at home and keeping them in a vault somebody else holds the key to: the second is usually more convenient, and almost always fine — but when it is not fine, the difference is everything.

How this stands with Yataio

The data lives in the phone's memory. There is no account to open, so there is nothing to deactivate and nothing that locks: if you stop paying the subscription, the paid features stop being available, but customers, items and documents stay where they are, which is with you.

The backup is an encrypted copy that you make, password-protected, on the phone or on your own cloud. It is yours in the literal sense: it sits where you put it.

This, again, has its other side — if you lose the phone and have not made a copy, nobody can recover it for you. I wrote about that at length in who can see my customers' data.

How to make and restore a copy is in the guide.