You can leave the company that looks after your technology without a bad month

You have been having the same conversation with yourself since about February. Nothing dramatic happened — a question that took four days to come back, an answer nobody could give twice, a bill that has grown without a conversation. You have not said anything yet, because the decision is not the part that worries you. The month afterwards is.

Take the worry off the table first: all of it is yours. Your passwords, your files, your accounts, your web address — none of it became theirs by sitting in their care. And where a handover goes badly, it is rarely anger. It is two weeks of slow replies and one record with the wrong name on it.

What you are owed, and how to ask for it

Most owners picture the handover as a box of passwords going across a desk. It is wider than that, and the parts you have never looked at are the ones that take weeks. Ask for it all in one written message, with a date you would like it back by:

• Every sign-in you pay for, and which one of them opens the others.
• The master account for your email and your files — the one that can add a person and remove a person.
• Where the copies of your files are kept, and how somebody outside their company gets one back.
• The registration of your domain name — your web address — and whose account it sits in.
• Everything you pay for month by month, with the renewal date beside each one.
• Whatever anybody has written down about how your office is put together, and the numbers of the suppliers behind it.

One line on that list decides most of what follows. The registration of your web address, and the master account for your email, should carry your firm’s name and an address at your firm. Where somebody else’s name sits on either one, everything else takes longer.

That registration is a public record, and whoever you are thinking of hiring can look it up in a minute. Have them do it before you give notice. Two answers, no conversation, and you will know whether this is a two-week handover or a two-month one.

Do not switch the old one off on the day the new one starts

The instinct after a decision like this is to be clean about it: last day of the month, one arrangement ends and the other begins on Monday. That is the version that produces the bad month. Give notice in writing with the list attached, and leave the old arrangement standing until the new one has been proven.

Proven has a plain meaning here. A Monday morning with everybody in the building. A month-end. Somebody locked out at ten past seven, and a person who picked up. A file taken out of the copies and opened by the new firm, with nobody from the old one on the call.

None of this needs to be cold. Frederick County is small enough that you will see these people at a breakfast in October, and most of them know it. Ask, at the end, for a short written note saying what moved and on what date. Most firms write it, and most would still like the referral.

The questions to ask before you sign the next one

Ask whoever you are about to hire what the day you leave them looks like. A firm that answers that plainly, in month one, while it still wants the work, is telling you more than its proposal does.

Four answers belong in the agreement rather than in a friendly email. Your name on the registration of your web address and on the master accounts. The passwords on request at any time, not only at the end. Your files back in a form somebody else can read. And a notice period you could serve in your busiest month.

Ask as well whether anything is charged for the handover itself, and have that written down rather than described. Nobody minds the question in month one. The month you actually leave is a poor time to discover it was never discussed.

Most of the handovers we see are dull, which is the right outcome — two firms, one list, a few weeks of overlap, and a Monday nobody remembers. If you would rather know what you actually hold before you say anything to anyone, a review is ninety minutes on site, and the written report is yours either way.