The records you inherit with an acquisition, tested one job at a time.

A closed deal is the answer key. Each of these tests runs on an acquisition you already integrated, because your team's finished setup shows what right looks like. The seller's records go in as they arrived, before anyone cleaned them, and every draft is scored against what your team built from them. The reviewer is often whoever ran that part of the integration, sometimes working with a longtime employee of the company you bought.

Records travel with the deal, and the originals stay put. Federal privacy law makes room for customer records changing hands in a sale: the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act's notice and opt-out rules carry an exception for disclosures made in connection with a proposed or actual sale, merger or transfer of all or part of a business, at 15 U.S.C. 6802(e)(7). Whatever that allows for the deal, the test runs under its own NDA, on copies. The seller's own files still have to be kept, too. The IRS's general rule is to keep records for three years, and records about property until the limitations period ends for the year the property is disposed of. So the test reads copies and deletes nothing.

Some contracts need someone else's yes. Buying the stock rather than the assets doesn't always avoid a consent. In 2021, when a fund's subsidiary agreed to buy the stock of GreenWaste Recovery, the Town of Atherton, California, treated the purchase as a voluntary assignment under its franchise agreement, which allowed no transfer, a change of control included, without the town's prior consent. Private professional contracts carry similar terms: section 10.3 of AIA's owner-architect agreement, B101, bars either side from assigning it without the other's written consent, apart from the owner's lender. That is why the waste page holds franchise accounts at their approved rates and the engineering page records each contract's status. Consents themselves stay with your people.

Old addresses keep working after the close. An add-on's EDI customers send every interchange to the receiver ID the add-on published, the ISA08 field of the X12 envelope, so those orders keep landing in its system until each trading partner is moved; the distributor test takes the POs that still arrive by email. Rental money has its own path. When a California landlord's interest ends by sale or otherwise, Civil Code 1950.5(i) has the landlord pass what remains of each deposit to the successor and tell the tenant, or return it with an accounting. On none of these pages does the AI post a balance, move money or change what a customer pays.

What changes is the shape of the records. Item numbers and units at a distributor, agency structure and carrier names at an agency, rate codes and fees at a hauler, phases and labor categories at an engineering firm, a chart of accounts and reserve components at a management company. Each job page carries its own detail, what to send, how the test is scored and its one hard limit. The scope stays narrow on every one of them: one job's records in the months after a close. The migration, the system cutover and the integration plan stay with your team and whoever you hire to run them.