Legal / Leaving Hospitech

Leaving Hospitech — what happens to your data

Every business that puts five years of staff records into someone else's software eventually asks the same question: what happens if we stop? Here is the whole answer.

The short version

1. What "leaving" actually does

When your account is closed, three things happen and nothing else:

1. Every module is switched off. HR, Time, Roster & Holiday, HACCP, Training — whichever you had. Your managers and staff can no longer open them. 2. Every subscription is cancelled. You stop being billed that day. There is no notice period and no exit fee. 3. The 90-day clock starts.

What does not happen: not one record is deleted, changed or hidden. Your employees, rosters, clock-ins, contracts, food-safety checks, training certificates and uploaded files are exactly where you left them.

Your login keeps working. This is deliberate. An account you cannot sign into is an account you cannot export from, and "your data is yours" would be a slogan rather than a fact. You will not be able to open the modules; you will be able to get your data out and to ask to come back.

2. The 90 days

Ninety days from the day you close. We use the same 90 days as our shutdown commitment so there is one number to remember, not two.

During it:

• Export anything, as often as you like, free. This is true on every plan and was true before you left.
• Come back whenever you want. Reopening restores the modules you had switched on at the moment you left — we take a snapshot of that on the way out, so you are not rebuilding your account from memory. Your data was never gone, so there is nothing to restore.
• Billing does not restart by itself. Reopening switches your modules back on; what you pay is agreed with us first. We will not quietly put you back on a price you did not re-agree to.

The date is recorded on your account, not in someone's calendar, and we will tell you what it is in writing when you close.

3. What you should take with you

Some of these records you are legally required to keep yourself, whether or not you keep using us. Export them before the 90 days are up:

Our 90 days is a courtesy. Your statutory retention periods are longer than ours and they are yours, not ours. If an inspector asks for a record in 2029, "our old software deleted it" is not a defence available to you. Export before you go.

4. Deletion at the end

At 90 days your data becomes eligible for deletion, and we delete:

• every record in every part of the platform — employees, rosters, clock-ins, leave, contracts, documents, food-safety submissions, training attempts and certificates, settings, audit history;
• every file you uploaded or we generated for you — signed contracts, policy PDFs, certificates, photographs taken during food-safety checks;
• the login accounts that existed only to reach your account.

Two things survive, and we would rather say so than let you find out:

1. A record that you existed and were deleted — your company name, the dates you opened, closed and were deleted, and how much was removed. It holds no personal data about anybody. We keep it because "did you actually delete us, and when?" is a question you are entitled to ask after the answer itself is gone. 2. Billing records we are required to keep under Irish tax and company law — invoices, and what you paid.

Backups are not instant. Data already written to a backup disappears as that backup expires on its normal cycle; it is not restored into the live system in the meantime.

Honest note on how this runs today. The deletion is a deliberate action taken by a person, from a list the system puts in front of us of every account past its date. It is not yet a job that runs on its own at midnight. The safeguards are in the other direction — the system physically refuses to delete anyone whose 90 days have not finished, refuses if any of your files are still in storage, and refuses to half-finish; a deletion either removes everything or removes nothing. What is not yet automated is the reminder, and that is a scheduling gap, not a data-protection one. It will be automated before the platform is large enough for the list to be missed.

5. If you simply stop paying

Not the same as leaving, and we will not treat it as if it were.

1. A payment fails. We email you and try again over the following days. 2. 14 days after the first failure, if it is still unpaid and we have not heard from you, the account is closed as in section 1 — modules off, data intact, 90-day clock running. 3. From there it is identical to leaving. Pay and tell us, and you are switched back on with everything where it was.

We do not delete anyone for non-payment, and we do not hold your records hostage against an unpaid invoice. You can always export, including while you owe us money. That is the whole point of section 2 of the Data Portability Commitment.

6. Your staff

Your staff's data is yours as controller, not ours. When you close, their access ends with everyone else's, and their records are deleted with yours at 90 days.

If a member of your staff asks us directly to see or delete their data, we pass the request to you and tell them we have — we are your processor and it is not our call. See the Privacy Notice and DPA.

7. If we are the ones who leave

If Hospitech ever discontinues the platform, you get at least 90 days' written notice and a full export before anything is switched off. That commitment is written down separately and later versions of these terms will not dilute it.

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