Tool Documents

Leaving Well

The decision to leave is made, the replacement is chosen, and the remaining question is what you walk out with. That is settled in the last fortnight of access and it is mostly a checklist.

Reviewed August 9, 2026.

Before you give notice

Export everything, in every available format. Do this before notifying, not after — notice occasionally changes what is available, and there is no reason to find out. For a separate operational reference from Monitask, see further details.

Verify the export opens and contains what you expect. An unverified export is an assumption.

Screenshot the configuration, which does not come out.

And inventory the integrations, including the ones nobody listed.

Giving notice

Check the window and the required form. Missing it costs a full term, and email may not be valid where the contract specifies written notice.

For broader context, see ISO.

Send it inside the window, in the specified form, to the specified address.

Keep proof of delivery.

And confirm receipt in writing. One reply, and it settles a dispute that occasionally arises.

Before access ends

Export again, on the last practical day. The first export is a rehearsal; this one is the record.

Get the final invoices and statements, which in some categories you are obliged to retain.

Revoke the vendor's access to your other systems — connected accounts, authorisation grants, keys. This is the step most often skipped, and it leaves a live connection to a system you no longer monitor.

Remove the vendor from your own disclosures where they appeared as a subprocessor, and update your records of processing.

And confirm the deletion timeline in writing, so that you know when the data is gone rather than assuming.

What to keep, and where

A dated archive folder, in storage you control, containing the final export, the configuration screenshots, the integration inventory, the contract, and the final statements.

Not in the replacement tool. A file, outside all of it.

Labelled with the period it covers, because in some categories the retention obligation runs for years and the person who needs it will not be you.

Telling the vendor why

Optional and worth doing.

A specific reason is useful to them and costs you nothing — the export was incomplete, the price moved, the model did not fit.

And it occasionally produces an offer, which you can decline having already exported everything, from a position nobody usually occupies.

The nine, as a list

Export. Verify. Screenshot configuration. Inventory integrations. Check the notice window. Send notice in the required form. Export again at the end. Revoke access. File the archive.

An afternoon in total, spread over the notice period, and it is the difference between having left a tool and having lost the contents of one.

The short version