A wind-down checklist for your company's digital records

Wind-down plans usually cover leases, payroll, contracts and equipment in detail. Digital records tend to get one line, if that: "cancel subscriptions." That line hides a dozen decisions, and several of them cannot be undone once a billing date passes.

This checklist is meant for founders, finance leads and advisors running a wind-down. It works whether the company is closing next month or simply planning ahead.

Physical assets wait for you. A desk stays in the office until someone moves it. Software does not wait. When a subscription lapses, many tools keep data for a limited period and then delete it on their own schedule. When the last administrator leaves, recovering access can turn into a support ticket that runs for weeks.

Digital records also carry obligations and value at the same time. Some of them must be kept for legal, tax or regulatory reasons. Some contain personal information that has to be handled carefully. And some, particularly the operational history in chat, tickets, code and email, may be worth money. A plan lets you deal with all three before the deadlines decide for you.

Start with a complete list. Pull it from the expense report or card statements rather than memory, because the forgotten tools are the ones that cause trouble. For each system, note the owner, the admin accounts, the renewal or cancellation date, and roughly how many years of history it holds.

Most companies will find records in these places:

• Chat, such as Slack or Microsoft Teams
• Email and calendars
• Docs, wikis and shared drives
• Ticketing and project tools, such as Jira, Linear or Asana
• Code repositories, pull requests and CI pipelines
• CRM and sales tools
• Customer support and help-desk platforms
• Finance, billing, expense and accounting software
• HR, payroll and benefits platforms
• Password managers and cloud infrastructure accounts

The inventory is also the first thing a liquidator, buyer or data evaluator will ask for. Having it ready saves time for everyone.

Before cancelling a single tool, make sure at least two people who will be around for the whole wind-down have admin access to each system. Departing employees often hold the only admin login for a tool they set up years ago.

Then check, for each system, what happens on cancellation. How long is data retained after the plan ends? Can it be exported in full, including attachments and edit history, or only in part? Does a downgrade to a free tier delete older history? Write down the dates. A cheap month of extra subscription can be worth paying to keep options open while decisions are made.

Finally, keep the company's email domain and DNS records alive until the end. Many accounts use email for password resets, and a lapsed domain can lock you out of everything at once.

Not every record is yours to discard, and not every record should be shared. Sort them into three groups.

The first group is records you may be required to keep: accounting books, tax filings, employment records, contracts and anything subject to a litigation hold. Your counsel and accountant will tell you what retention periods apply in your jurisdictions and who should hold the records after closing. This is general information, not legal advice, so involve counsel on retention and disposal decisions.

The second group is sensitive material that should stay out of any outside use: HR files, payroll, medical information and legally privileged folders. These are the categories we exclude from licensing by default.

The third group is operational history: the chat, tickets, code, docs, CRM and support records that show how the company actually worked. This is the part with potential value to AI labs, and it is the part most likely to be deleted by accident.

AI labs license anonymized operational data to train and evaluate agents. A wind-down is often the last moment that data exists in one piece, which is why it belongs on the checklist rather than in a footnote.

The process is designed to take little of your time. A 15-minute intro call, then you set the scope and any exclusions, such as specific clients, channels or folders. Those exclusions are annexed to the contract before any data moves. A read-only evaluation takes under an hour of your time. Anonymization happens in-house, you review an anonymized sample, and payment goes to the company entity in two to four weeks. Licences typically range from $20K to $400K or more, and there is no firm number until the data has been counted.

For a closing company, a director, officer, liquidator or assignee with authority over company assets can sign. We ask for the authority document up front. For why this asset is so often missed, see the forgotten asset in every startup shutdown.

Once records are preserved, licensed or handed to whoever will hold them, finish the job properly.

Rotate or revoke credentials and API keys, and shut down cloud resources that could keep billing. Remove remaining user accounts. Cancel subscriptions in a deliberate order, with the systems that others depend on, such as email and identity, going last. Keep a short written log of what was exported, where it went, what was deleted and when. If you licensed data, keep the deletion certificate for the raw archive, which is issued within 30 days of sign-off.

That log is a small document, but it answers most of the questions a board, creditor or former customer might ask later.

If your company is winding down and you want to know what its records might be worth before anything is cancelled, book a short call.