Every business system is easy to join. Somebody helps you import your products, the first week goes well, and within a month your sales, your customers, your costs and your stock live somewhere you do not control. The question worth asking on day one, while it is still a neutral question, is how you would leave.
This is not a prediction that the relationship will go badly. It is the same reason you keep a copy of your own accounts: ownership is not about distrust, it is about not being dependent on goodwill.
Four things to establish before you commit
Can you export, from every screen? Not a report a supplier runs for you on request. A button, on the sales list, the stock list, the customer list and the reports, producing Excel or CSV. If a supplier cannot show you one in a demo, assume there is not one.
Is the export complete? There is a difference between exporting what is on the screen and exporting the whole period. A system that silently limits an export to the page you are looking at will give you a file that looks right and is missing most of the rows. We have found exactly that in systems we inherited, more than once.
Who holds the backup, and can you have one? Ask what is backed up, how often, how long copies are kept, and whether you can be given one. A supplier who backs up daily and cannot give you a copy has protected themselves, not you.
Whose names are on the accounts? The domain, the hosting and the code repository should be registered to your company from the first day, whoever does the work. A surprising number of small businesses discover years later that their own domain belongs to a developer who has stopped answering email.
The uncomfortable test
Ask a supplier this, in these words: if we decided to leave next year, what would we take with us and in what format? A good answer is specific and slightly boring. A defensive one, or a promise that you will never want to, is the answer.
You are not testing whether they would help you leave. You are testing whether the software was built by people who assumed you might.
What the data is worth to you
Three years of sales history is the only record of what your business actually does through a season. It is what tells you what to order before Ramadan, which lines earn their shelf space, and which customers are worth carrying. Losing it in a migration does not stop the shop trading, which is why it is treated as acceptable, and it quietly costs you two or three years of learning.
What we do
Every list and report in RekordPOS exports to Excel, CSV or PDF, and the export is the whole range rather than the page on screen. For the studio side of the work, the standing rule is that the domain, the hosting account and the repository are in the client's name from the first day. We have written more about what to demand of a partner in how to rate a software development company in the Maldives.
The same subject from the other side of the counter, written for the person using the till rather than choosing it, is on the product's own blog: did the shop make money today.
If you are on a system today and do not know the answer to any of the four questions above, that is worth an afternoon. Ask us and we will help you find out, whether or not you ever become a customer.