Leaving Factorial without losing the record

Leaving Factorial is mostly a reporting exercise, with one thing to check first: where your payroll history actually lives. Factorial is a broad all-in-one, so the directory, time tracking, leave and documents come out of the product in an afternoon. Payroll, depending on your market and your setup, may be computed inside the product or handed to an integrated provider, and if a provider holds your pay history and filings, that is a second export with a second counterparty. Confirm that before you give notice.

One note on sourcing. What follows about Factorial’s own product is our reading of their public material, read in September 2026, and gathered through search because direct access to their help sites is blocked from where this was written. Their help centre is the authority, screens move between releases, and you should confirm the current article before planning a week of work around a menu path. Everything else here is about your obligations and your data, which do not move when a vendor ships a redesign.

What you are actually moving

• The directory. Who works here, in what capacity, on what terms, from which location and legal entity. Your master index.
• Time tracking and attendance. The hours and clock records you are obliged to keep or want to carry, which for a product whose core includes time tracking can be a substantial pile.
• Leave balances and policies. Current balances and the accrual rules behind them, written in words.
• Documents. Contracts, identity papers, policy acknowledgements, anything uploaded to a profile.
• Performance records. Reviews and goals, as far back as you want to carry.
• Payroll output. Pay registers and payslips for every closed month, wherever they live, inside Factorial or with an integrated provider.
• Statutory output. The filings you made, with their references, and the year-end documents, held wherever payroll is processed.
• The year-to-date position, per person. The running totals that carry through the tax year.

The export checklist, in order

Do all of this while the account is active and paid.

1. Directory first, with every column and custom field, as your index.
2. Time and attendance history, exported for the period you must keep, filed by month.
3. Leave balances, exported, with the policies written out in plain words.
4. Documents, tested on one profile before you size the job across headcount.
5. Performance history, reviews and goals, tested on one person first.
6. Payroll, from wherever it lives. If Factorial computes it, pull the registers and payslips. If a provider does, ask the provider in writing for the full report set, filed by month, each filing paired with its reference.
7. The year-to-date pack, which you have to ask for, one spreadsheet, one row per person, reconciled against your filings and your bank before you accept it.

On GDPR, for a European team

A European team naturally reaches for data-protection rights when leaving a vendor, so it is worth being precise. Your employment records are the company’s own data, held by you as controller, and you take them out through the product export while the subscription is live. Individual data-subject access rights are a separate mechanism about a person’s own personal data and are not a bulk-export route for the employer. For the migration, rely on the product export and your contract, finish before access ends, and treat retention and controller duties as your own obligation, confirmed with your adviser. GDPR and employee data is the fuller map.

Timing: the tax year decides, not your renewal date

The cheapest boundary is the start of your tax year, with everyone at zero year to date and the prior year closed by the system that computed it. The next best is after a filing period has been reconciled. Avoid the year-end run-in, when reconciliation and year-end documents land together and carry a statutory deadline the migration does not. If you cannot wait, agree in writing which party is responsible for which filing and for which period before anything is cancelled.

The separation that makes a mid-year move cheaper

The system that holds your records and the system that computes your payroll do not have to be the same system, and they do not have to change on the same day. Separate them, and you can move the record whenever it suits you while changing who computes at the tax-year boundary, because the year-to-date arithmetic stays put.

That separation is Capstan’s default. Capstan compiles joiners and leavers, pay structures, leave, attendance and adjustments into a documented export for your payroll partner, and files the results the partner returns back onto each employee record. It holds no rate, slab, bracket, threshold or formula, computes no gross to net, and files nothing with any authority. The payroll module sets out what crosses the line in each direction, and payroll-first HR systems describes the alternative shape plainly.

Where it tends to be hard

Payroll may not be inside the product. The most common surprise is assuming pay history is in Factorial when a provider holds it. Confirm where it lives in week one.

Time-tracking history is large. For a product whose core is time tracking, the attendance and hours history can be the biggest single export. Test the mechanism and size the job early.

Leave balances mean nothing without their policy. A balance is the output of an accrual rule, and no two systems model accrual identically. Export the numbers, write the rules down, and expect to key opening balances by hand.

Access ends on a schedule. Read your contract for the retrieval window and the deletion process, diarise both, and finish your export well before the first.

What you have to keep, whoever you buy from

Employment and tax records carry retention obligations that follow the employer, not the software, and they differ by country and statute. Keep your own dated archive outside any vendor, a folder per tax year sub-foldered by month, holding the registers, payslips, filings and year-end documents. Records you hold are records nobody can revoke, suspend or reprice. Confirm the periods with your adviser rather than with any vendor, including us.

Standing up the replacement

Use the implementation checklist for the general order, and read this as the overlay. Validate the export first: open the files, confirm payslip counts match headcount, confirm register totals tie to your bank. Load the new system in parallel while the old one is live. With Capstan that is a spreadsheet import with a dry run that previews every row and fails bad rows individually; documents load per person, opening leave balances are entered as adjustments with a reason, and effective-dated history is not imported, so your export stays your archive of it. What imports and what does not is written out in full. Set one company-wide go-live date, hand your payroll partner a past month of inputs and compare, and reconcile ten people by hand before you cancel.

Who should stay where they are

Be fair to the product you are leaving. A broad all-in-one with a marketplace of integrations and a large existing customer base is doing real work, and if that breadth and maturity are the value you are buying, staying is a reasonable answer and we would say so in your position. A narrower, record-first system with partner-integration payroll suits teams who want a clean, portable record, who integrate through webhooks rather than a marketplace, and who work with a payroll partner by choice. It does not suit a team that wants a long list of pre-built connectors working on day one. The Factorial comparison sets the two published models side by side, including where Capstan is the wrong tool.

Where to go next

Whatever you buy, start your shortlist with the export is the habit worth keeping, and read how to read an HR pricing page before you compare totals so you get every candidate’s all-in number at your real headcount. Capstan’s figures are on one public pricing page, and the complete core is on every plan including the free one.