Who owns your client records?

Independence·7 min read

Your client database is ten years of relationships. It’s also, very concretely, the most valuable thing in your salon the day you sell it.

Two things that often get mixed up

On one side there’s the legal question (who is responsible for this data, under the GDPR), and on the other the practical one: can you get it back and take it elsewhere? The two don’t overlap, and it’s the second one that costs you.

You can be fully within your rights and still end up, in practice, with an unusable or incomplete export. That’s where lock-in happens.

What the GDPR really gives you

In the usual setup, the salon is the data controller: you decide why and how your clients’ data is used. The software you use is a processor: it acts on your instructions, and nothing else.

In practice, this means the provider cannot use your database for its own purposes, and must let you retrieve your data. Two rights matter more than the others:

• Portability. You can request your data in a structured, machine-readable format. A CSV or JSON file, not a 400-page PDF or a screenshot.
• Return and deletion at the end of the contract. When you leave, the processor must give the data back to you and then delete it from its systems, unless a legal retention obligation applies.

These obligations normally appear in a data processing agreement attached to the contract. If there isn’t one, that’s already an answer.

client-database.csv

1,248 records · full export

Exported columns

NameContact detailsHistoryPreferencesConsents

An open format, readable without the software that produced it.

What the GDPR doesn’t settle

The law gives you access to the data. It doesn’t guarantee that it will be useful to you.

• The scope of the export. Names and phone numbers, sure. But the service history, the color formulas, the preferences, the notes you’ve written over the years? That’s often where things get stuck, and that’s often the real value.
• Reviews. Reviews posted on a booking marketplace stay on that marketplace. The ones that weigh most on your visibility are your Google reviews, and those are attached to your Google Business Profile, not to a piece of software. All the more reason to grow them there.
• The relationship itself. If your clients got used to booking on a marketplace, they’ll go back there. The database, you can take with you; the habit, you can’t.

The three questions to ask before you sign

Ask them in writing, and keep the answer. A confident provider answers in two lines.

• “What exactly does the export contain, field by field?” Ask for a sample file. If the answer is “all your data” without detail, insist.
• “In what format, and how quickly?” CSV or JSON, self-service from the interface if possible, rather than a request handled by support within fifteen business days.
• “What happens to all of it when I cancel?” How long access stays open for you to retrieve it, and how soon the data is deleted afterward.

A fourth question, less legal but very telling: is leaving as simple as joining? If signing up takes three minutes and canceling takes a certified letter, you already know what you’re dealing with.

Our position, plainly

Your client records, your statistics, your database: they’re yours. Our hosting and our practices are GDPR-compliant, and if you leave one day, you leave with your data. We don’t lock you in.

That’s also why we take no commission on your direct channel: we have no interest in standing between you and your clients. The details of what we collect and why are in our privacy policy.