What a wind-down officer should do with company records and systems

The records track at a glance#

The records track of a wind-down plan is a sequence of six steps the officer runs alongside the financial and legal work. Each step depends on the one before it, so the order matters more than the speed.

Most wind-down plans cover employees, creditors, taxes and contracts in detail and give records a single line. The officer acts for the company, so decisions about records deserve the same documentation as decisions about receivables or equipment.

• 1Freeze: suspend auto-deletion, retention policies and device wipes.
• 2Map: list every system, its admin, its records and the date access ends.
• 3Export: pull complete exports into company-controlled storage and verify them.
• 4Sort: classify exports as must keep, hold, review for value, or destroy.
• 5Review: assess value and rights before any destruction decision is final.
• 6Hand off: name a custodian, document destruction and close admin access.

Step one: freeze deletion before people leave#

Freezing deletion is the first records duty because automated policies keep deleting after the people who configured them are gone. Email retention rules, chat retention settings, help desk archiving and device management tools can all remove records on a schedule nobody remembers setting. Zendesk, for example, lets admins create ticket deletion schedules that keep deleting archived tickets matching their criteria, and deleted tickets cannot be restored.

Check the admin consoles for Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, Slack or Teams, the help desk, the CRM, backup software and any mobile device management tool. Pause deletion policies, convert departing staff mailboxes to inactive or held mailboxes rather than deleting accounts, and tell IT not to wipe returned laptops until the map is finished.

If litigation, a government inquiry or a disputed claim is pending or reasonably expected, counsel may require a formal legal hold. A legal hold overrides routine retention and destruction, and the officer should keep a written record of when it was issued and to whom.

Step two: build the system map#

The system map is a single table listing every place company records live, who can administer it and when access ends. Finance can usually produce the subscription list from card statements and accounts payable; IT and department heads fill in the rest.

Rows with an unknown admin carry the most risk. If the only administrator has already left, recovering access through the vendor's ownership verification process can be slow, so start those first.

Step three: export and verify before shutoff#

An export is complete only when someone has compared it against the live system and confirmed that records, attachments and the links between records came across. A file that downloads without error can still be missing years of history or every attachment.

Do not rely on a vendor's grace period after cancellation. Many vendors keep data for a limited time after an account closes and then delete it, and the length differs by vendor and plan. Read the terms for each critical system and treat the renewal date, not the deletion date, as the deadline. Exports can expire too: Microsoft says Purview eDiscovery search exports are deleted 14 days after creation, so large packages must be downloaded promptly.

• 1Compare record counts and date ranges in the export with the live system.
• 2Open a sample of records and confirm attachments, comments and internal notes are present.
• 3Check that identifiers linking tickets to issues, or orders to invoices, survived the export.
• 4Store exports in company-controlled, encrypted storage with access limited to named people.
• 5Keep a manifest listing each export, its date, who took it and a checksum.
• 6Keep one admin account active until the verification is signed off.

Step four: sort what you exported#

Sorting exports means placing each record family in one of four buckets, so that retention duties, legal holds and possible value are each handled by the right person. The buckets drive what happens next, including what must never be destroyed early.

A retention schedule turns the must keep bucket into dates. Federal and state rules set minimum periods for tax, employment and benefits records, and those periods vary, so confirm them with the company's accountant and counsel instead of copying a generic list.

Steps five and six: review value, then hand off custody#

The value review asks whether any retained or reviewable records could be licensed to help fund the wind-down, and it should finish before destruction or final distribution. A first pass uses metadata only: system names, years of history, record families and known restrictions.

Operational records with linked outcomes, such as tickets tied to fixes or orders tied to exceptions, tend to matter most. Any license needs board authority and a rights review, and proceeds belong to the wind-down estate, where they are applied to obligations before any distribution.

The custody handoff closes the track. The officer names a custodian in writing, delivers an index of retained records with storage locations, decryption keys and destroy-by dates, and files certificates for anything destroyed. Admin access to every system is then revoked or the accounts are closed.

Illustrative: a distributor's wind-down officer works the list#

Illustrative: Harlan Basin Supply, a fictional industrial distributor, decides to close after losing its largest supply line. The board appoints an outside restructuring professional as wind-down officer. The company runs Epicor for orders and inventory, Samsara for fleet tracking, a shared Outlook mailbox for customer service and a file server holding scanned delivery receipts going back many years.

The officer pauses the Microsoft 365 retention policy, then builds the map and finds that the Epicor hosting contract ends before the final payroll. Epicor becomes the first export: a full database backup plus a virtual machine image of the application server, because the database alone is hard to read without the application. Order exception notes and returns records go to the review bucket; driver records and customer contact lists go to must keep or destroy.

The metadata review shows that order exceptions link to resolutions and credit memos across many years. The board authorizes a rights review of that slice only. Retained financial records go to the former controller as custodian, and the file server is wiped under a certificate after its scans are copied.

How SourceX fits into the records track#

SourceX fits at step five, when the officer needs to know whether reviewable records could support a license. The initial assessment collects metadata, not files, so it can run while exports are still in progress, and the supplier approves every step after that.

If a package proceeds, the SourceX five-step transaction runs from Supply through Rights, Preparation, Approval and Delivery, and the SourceX Evidence Packet records the release authorization the officer signed. Large exports stay in the company's own storage or ship on encrypted drives; SourceX does not host them.