Every vendor evaluation in this industry runs on the same script: a demo, a reference call, a pricing sheet, a security questionnaire if you’re diligent. None of those answer the question that matters most about a system you are going to live in for a decade. The question is whether the data in it is yours in any practical sense, and the only way to find out is to ask for all of it. Not a report. Not a screen. A complete export of your records, today, in a format somebody outside the vendor could read, with a document explaining what the fields mean. Then start a stopwatch. I have been building title software on open formats for most of three decades, and I have never seen a better single test of a vendor than how they respond to that request.

What “Your Data” Actually Is

The first thing the test exposes is how much of your data the vendor thinks you own. Ask for an export and most will offer the documents: the images, as PDFs or TIFFs, in a folder. That is the least interesting part. A title operation’s data is at least six layers deep, and the value is mostly in the upper five.

The images themselves. The index records: grantor, grantee, instrument type, recording information, legal description. The metadata that makes those records usable: when the record was created, by whom, from what source, with what confidence. The relationships: which document belongs to which parcel, which parcel to which chain, which chain to which file. The work product your people added on top: notes, exceptions, requirement language, the examiner’s judgment calls that turned a search into a commitment. And the configuration: the processing rules, templates, and settings that encode how your shop does things. A vendor who hands you the images and calls it an export has given you the box the data came in.

What Format Counts

The second thing the test exposes is whether the export is readable by anyone but the vendor. A proprietary backup file is not an export. It is the same lock, delivered to your front door. A real export is standard files: images as PDF or TIFF with a manifest, records as CSV or JSON, relationships preserved through stable identifiers that appear in both the records and the manifest, and a schema document that names every field and says what it contains. If the vendor’s own engineers couldn’t rebuild your plant from the export using nothing but that schema, neither can the next vendor, which means neither can you.

This is not a high bar. Every serious database can produce it. The vendors who struggle with it struggle because their data model is tangled enough that the relationships live in application code rather than in the data, and that is worth knowing before you sign, not after.

How Long It Should Take

The stopwatch matters because a full export should be a routine job, not a project. Somewhere in the vendor’s system there is either a button, a scheduled task, or a one-line request to support that produces it in hours. If the answer involves a statement of work, a few weeks, and a professional services invoice, then the export doesn’t exist yet; what exists is a promise to write one, at your expense, under time pressure, at the moment you are leaving. The September 22 post argued that “we’ll integrate with anything” is a statement about the future dressed up as a statement about the present. “We can build you an export” is the same sentence with the verbs rearranged.

What the Exit Clause Should Say

Read the termination section of the contract with the export in mind, because that is where the test gets written down. On termination, what is delivered, in what format, within how many days, and at what cost? A vendor who prices the exit high is pricing lock-in, and telling you so. A vendor who leaves the format unspecified has left themselves room to hand you the box. The clause you want is short: full export of all customer data in documented, non-proprietary formats within thirty days of termination, at no charge beyond a reasonable media cost, with the schema included. If a vendor won’t put that sentence in writing, the demo told you less than you thought.

Why Consolidation Makes This Worse

The May 28 post on the all-in-one trap argued that vendor consolidation trades flexibility for convenience. The export test shows the mechanism. Every function you consolidate into a single platform is another layer of data whose exit depends on that one vendor’s cooperation. A shop running production, plant, escrow accounting, and document management on one system has one export to worry about, and it is enormous, and if it fails the whole business is inside it. That is not an argument against integration. It is an argument for making sure the export works before the integration makes you dependent on it.

Run the Test Before You Sign, and Every Year After

The practical version is simple. During evaluation, ask for a complete export of the sandbox or pilot data, with the schema, and time it. Open the files on a machine the vendor doesn’t control. Count records against what the system shows. Pick twenty documents and confirm their links to parcels and files survived the trip. Then, once you are a customer, run the same test annually. Systems change, data models migrate, and the export that worked at signing can quietly stop working three versions later. An export you have never opened is a backup you have never restored, and the July 23 post on continuity planning covered how that story ends.

Including Ours

We will run this test on request, and I would rather you asked than assumed. Ask for a sample export from any Electra system and we will send the files and the schema that describes them, and you can time us. Electra has been built on open-source tooling and open formats since the beginning, not out of virtue but because I have watched too many shops discover, at the worst possible moment, that the system they paid for owned them. Your data should leave as easily as it arrived. If a vendor can’t show you that in an afternoon, you already know what the exit will look like.

Ask us for a sample export and the schema that goes with it →