Getting your salon data out: how to ask, and what comes back

Most hairdressers do not stay with a package because it is good. They stay because they are afraid of losing eight years of client data. That fear is reasonable — and largely unfounded, because there is a law about exactly this.

What the law gives you

Article 20 of the GDPR gives you the right to data portability: the personal data you entrusted to a processor must come back to you in "a structured, commonly used and machine-readable format". Machine-readable is the phrase that matters. A PDF with six thousand clients in it is technically an answer and practically not one.

The deadline is one month from receipt of your request, extendable if the request is complex. Which is precisely why this is the first thing you do when you start thinking about switching, and not the last.

Two things the right does not cover, and which you therefore ask for separately: data that is not about people (your product list, your services with their duration and price, your deliveries) and data the supplier created themselves rather than received from you. In practice you simply ask for them as well — nothing stops a supplier handing them over, and most do.

What a usable request looks like

Keep it short, written and concrete. Do not ask for "my data" but list what you want, in the words their software uses. Something along these lines will do:

That last sentence is the most important one of all and is almost always forgotten. An export without a field description costs more time to read in than the export itself.

• Send it by e-mail, so it carries a date. The one-month clock only starts on receipt.
• Ask before you cancel, not after. While you are still a customer, the tone of the conversation is different.
• Explicitly ask for your colour history. It is the most valuable part of a salon's file, and the part most often missing.

And that is where the work starts

An export is not an endpoint but a raw material. An eight-year file holds duplicates, swapped first and last names, and records that are not clients at all but calendar blocks someone once created as clients. At the salon we studied in August 2026, 882 of 5,989 clients had missing details.

On top of that, an export can simply be wrong with nothing to show for it. Four examples from that same file, all found only by recounting the totals:

1. A product list that ignored every pagination parameter and returned 350 of 1,322 products — in triplicate.
2. A staff list with former staff left out, leaving 29,881 appointment blocks attached to nothing.
3. Blocks returned unsorted, while the start time of an appointment is the earliest block and not the first one in the list: 9,026 appointments at the wrong time.
4. One absence repeated under every day it covered, each time with the same uuid. Deduplicate on that and a week of leave becomes one day.

None of those four produces an error message. They produce a plausible result that is wrong, and that is the dangerous kind. The only way to find them is to count: how many clients did you have, how many appointments last year, how many products in your list. Write those numbers down before you export, and lay them alongside afterwards.

What to expect from your new supplier

Ask how they handle whatever the import does not understand. "We will sort that out" is the wrong answer. The right one is that you get to see it: a list of what could not be placed, and a screen where you decide. Only you know whether "Van Eckere" and "Van Ekeren" are the same person.

What that looks like with us — which policy applies to which kind of data, and what ends up in an archive — is on the switching page.

This article is not legal advice. The law is there, but what a given supplier delivers within that month varies from supplier to supplier — which is exactly why you ask today, and not the week before you want to move.