In Part I we told you that

• while you might think there is no single most important clause as there are a lot of important clauses, especially if you ask around,
• liability or penalty clauses are quite important, or that
• termination matters

the reality is that

• there is a most important clause, and it’s not what you think,
• liability is worthless if collecting costs more than you get, and
• you can’t terminate if you don’t have another choice!

We also told you that, after signing the contract, there is a good chance you will be screwed to some extent, whether or not the provider intends it. Between:

• psychopathic salespeople who will promise anything to sign the deal (and off to their next job before the reckoning comes),
• investor owners that are going to limit/cut support when unreachable sales targets are not hit, forcing the C-Suite to pick and choose who to screw over,
• the fact that your vendor will likely be acquired (because if it’s not, it’s likely to go out of business since there are almost 10 times the number of vendors we need in ProcureTech), and
• the fact that a struggling vendor with the best of intentions will take on too much and be forced to leave some customers high and dry

the chances are, like it or NOT, that you are going to be screwed. (And possibly doomed and entombed by the proprietary software using proprietary data formats that you probably shouldn’t have bought.)

This means there is one clause that overrules them all:

IT’S MY DATA … AND I CAN, AND WILL, GET IT ANYTIME I WANT IT!

Then we made it clear in Part II that while you might think it’s your data, you’ll think again when something happens 6 to 18 months down the road and you need to get it out. Chances are that, unless the developers give you a full database dump (in an underlying schema you have no documentation for, using encryption you have to acquire third party software for), you will be limited to exporting a few reports, and small transaction or record sets at a time. (Unless, of course, you include a clause mandating this, test it after all of your data has been imported and you have run a few events/processed a few thousand transactions to augment it, and penalty and termination clauses with damages and real teeth if this critical requirement is violated.)

But what we didn’t make clear is:

YOUR DATA IS MORE THAN JUST YOUR DATA

It’s also your configuration!

–> Who is using the software and what access rights they have.

–> What processes and workflows they are using.

–> And, most importantly, how those processes are configured!

Now, we’ll be brutally honest here and say that while you can’t expect to be able to import these settings into the next app you get for the same purpose, because every app is slightly different with slightly different configuration capabilities, workflow, etc.

It is very likely this is the only documentation you have of:

• who is allowed to use the software and what they are permitted to do
• what processes and workflows you are following
• what approval processes you are using and who is actually approving
• and so on.

In other words, it is very likely that the ONLY documentation you have on your processes and practices is in the tools you are using, and, more specifically, in the configurations. Thus it’s absolutely essential you be able to export those as well. Even though you will have to manually recreate them when you switch platforms, it is still better to have documentation on what you were doing, and who was doing it, than none at all. Plus, you can then analyze your processes and find opportunities for improvement with these records!

So make sure that when you select an app you can get your data, and we mean all of your data, at any time before you sign on the bottom line. That way, no matter what happens, you’ll never really be screwed.