Guide
Keeping your records yours
Most builders change the program they run on every few years. The records outlive the program every time — a tax question reaches back years, a dispute over a job reaches back further, and neither cares which software you were using at the time.
The principle
Whatever you use, you should be able to walk away from it and still have your business. Not a promise that you'd get your data if you asked — an actual file, on your actual computer, that opens without the program that made it.
This is worth doing whether or not you're thinking of changing anything. It's the same reasoning as keeping the paper contract in a drawer: you're not expecting trouble, you just don't want the only copy to be somewhere you don't control.
The test
Set aside half an hour this week and try to get each of these out of whatever you run on now. Not "find the export button" — actually do it, open the file afterwards, and see whether what's in it would be any use to you.
- Your jobs, with their budgets. Each job, what it's worth, what it was budgeted at, line by line.
- Your invoices, with the detail on them. Not just a list of totals — the lines, so an invoice could be explained to a client two years from now.
- Your hours. By person, by job, by day. This is the one most often missing, and it's the one you need most in a dispute.
- Your bills and costs, each against the job it belongs to.
- Your documents and photos. Site photos especially — they're evidence, and they're usually the biggest thing to be locked in.
- Your people and clients, with contact details.
What a good answer looks like
- It opens without the program. A spreadsheet, a CSV, a PDF, an ordinary folder of files. If it only opens in the thing that made it, you haven't got your records — you've got a copy of their database.
- You can do it yourself, today, without asking anyone. If it takes a support ticket, that's an answer in itself: fine while everyone's friendly, no use in the week you actually need it.
- It's complete. A list of invoice totals with no lines, or photos with their dates and jobs stripped off, is the shape of a record without the substance.
- The files are named like files. Forty thousand photos called IMG_4471.jpg in one folder is technically your data and practically nothing.
When it matters
Not usually when you expect. The common ones are dull: a client questions a cost from last spring; an accountant wants the year's job costs a different way; you sell or wind up the business and need years of records to survive it; a subscription lapses in a bad month and the records go quiet with it.
None of those are emergencies if you already have the files. All of them are bad weeks if you don't.
A reasonable habit
Do the export once a quarter and put it somewhere ordinary — an external drive, a backup folder, wherever your other important things live. It takes minutes once you've done it the first time, and it turns "can I get my records out" from a question into a fact you already know the answer to.
And do it before you need it. Every builder who has tried to get their records out in a hurry has discovered the same thing: the moment you need them urgently is the moment the process is least co-operative.
How Millo does it
Millo keeps a plain folder on your own computer alongside the program — your jobs, invoices, change orders, hours backups, photos and documents, filed by job, with names a person wrote rather than a database. You can open, print or email any of it without opening Millo at all, and if you stopped using Millo tomorrow the folder would still be there and still make sense. It's job-costing software that runs on your own office computer, bought once.