Before you trust a POS company with every sale, inventory count, and charge account in your store, check five things: how long it has served stores like yours, who owns it and who gets to decide whether it is sold, whether its core business makes money, whether stores your size already run on it, and what happens to your data if the company is sold or shuts down. The last one matters most, because it is the only one you can lock down on paper before you sign. If you own your data and can export all of it whenever you want, a change of ownership becomes an inconvenience you can walk away from instead of a hostage situation.
Why the question is fair in this industry
Owners of hardware, paint, farm, and lumber stores ask "how old is your company?" more often than buyers in most industries, and they have good reason. The software that runs independent supply stores has changed hands many times, usually between private equity firms. Epicor, maker of the Eagle system many hardware stores run, was bought by KKR from Apax Partners in 2016 and then sold to Clayton, Dubilier & Rice in a $4.7 billion deal announced in August 2020. ECI Software Solutions, which owns the Spruce lumberyard system, was acquired by Apax in 2017 and then by Leonard Green & Partners in late 2020, with Apax keeping a minority stake.
None of that means those systems stopped working. It means the company you signed with may not be the company you renew with, and a new owner who paid billions has its own plans for support budgets, pricing, and which products keep getting investment. Many store owners have lived through a support line that moved, a renewal that jumped, or a product that stopped changing, so being a little guarded when a vendor asks for your trust is good business, not paranoia.
Six things that tell you a POS company will be around
No single fact settles it, so look at all six together.
- How long it has served stores like yours. Age counts, but age in your industry counts more. A company that has run paint and hardware counters for four years knows more about your Saturday morning than one that has run restaurants for twenty.
- Who funds it, and who decides whether it gets sold. Ask who the investors are and how much the company has raised. Then ask the question most buyers skip: who has the final say on a sale? A company owned by a private equity fund is built to be sold again within a few years. A founder-led company where the founders hold veto rights over any acquisition is built to stay put.
- Whether the core business makes money. Venture funding is fuel for growth, but a company that loses money on every customer is living on borrowed time. Ask whether the business is profitable or could be, and how.
- How many stores run on it, and how big the biggest ones are. A client count tells you the product has survived real counters. The size of the largest clients tells you whether a store with your staff, your locations, and your transaction count is new territory or familiar ground.
- Who answers the phone. Ask whether support is in-house or run by a reseller, where it is based, whether it is included or billed separately, and how fast cases get resolved. Support is the first thing to change after an acquisition, so know what you are starting with.
- Whether the product keeps changing. Ask what shipped in the last six months. A system that is still getting better is one somebody is still investing in.
What happens to your data if the company is sold or shuts down
When a POS company is acquired, the system almost always keeps running, because the customers are the thing the buyer paid for. The real risks come later: a renewal price you did not plan for, a support line that gets slower, or a product the new owner decides to retire in favor of another one it owns. If a company shuts down outright, the risk is sharper, because a cloud system you cannot log into is a store you cannot run.
Both problems have the same answer, which is your data. If you own it and can get all of it out in a format another system can read, you can move on your own schedule. Your products and prices, customer list and charge account balances, open invoices, sales history, vendors, and purchase history are the pieces that matter, and every one of them should be exportable. Our guide to what transfers in a POS data migration walks through those pieces one at a time.
Where the data lives matters too. A server in the back room puts the backups on you, and a cloud system puts them on the vendor and its hosting provider. Ask which cloud provider the vendor uses, how often backups run, and whether data is copied to more than one location. Our piece on whether the cloud is more secure than your own server explains what a good answer sounds like, and our guide to what a cloud POS needs from your internet connection covers the other half of that tradeoff.
The cheapest insurance is a test. During the demo or the first month, ask the vendor to show you how to export your customer list and sales history, and then open the file yourself. If it comes out as a clean spreadsheet, you are covered. If the export takes a support ticket and a fee, you have learned something important while it is still easy to act on.
What to check in the contract
These are the clauses worth reading closely, and worth having your attorney read too, because this guide is general information, not legal advice.
| Clause | What you want it to say |
|---|---|
| Data ownership | You own your data, including sales, customer, and inventory records, and the vendor may use it only to provide the service. |
| Export during the agreement | You can export your data at any time, in a standard format such as CSV, without a fee. |
| Export after termination | How long you have to pull your data after the agreement ends, and in what format, before it is deleted. |
| Assignment and change of control | Whether the vendor can assign your agreement to a new owner, and whether you get notice or the right to leave if it does. |
| Renewal pricing | How much prices can change at renewal and how much notice you get. |
| End of life | How much notice you get if the product is retired, and what migration help comes with it. |
| Support | What support is included, during which hours, and whether it is delivered by the vendor or a reseller. |
Questions to ask in the demo
Bring these to the meeting and write down the answers, because the way a salesperson answers them tells you as much as the answers themselves.
- When was the company founded, and who was your first store client?
- Who are your investors, how much have you raised, and who decides whether the company gets sold?
- Have you received acquisition offers, and what did you do with them?
- How many stores run on your system today, and what is the largest client by number of locations?
- Can I talk to a store like mine, ideally one that came off the same system I run today?
- Show me how I export my customers, balances, and sales history, right now.
- Where is support based, is it included, and how fast do you resolve cases?
- What shipped in the last six months?
The same meeting is the place to run your own transactions through the system, and our POS demo script lists the ones worth bringing for each kind of store.
How Rundoo answers these
Rundoo is younger than the legacy systems most supply stores run, so here are the facts behind the answer to "how old is your company?"
Age and track record. Rundoo was founded in 2021 by Nick Hershey and Andrew Beckman, who both grew up with family in the trades. King's Paint and Paper in Capitola, California was the first client, and Rundoo now runs in over 500 stores in the U.S., Canada, and the Caribbean across paint, hardware, lawn and garden, farm and feed, and lumber. Our client stories name many of them by town.
Funding and who decides a sale. Rundoo has raised $48M in total funding, including a $30M Series B led by Battery Ventures, and is also backed by Bessemer Venture Partners and CRV. Our CEO has written that the founders have received multiple acquisition offers and turned them down, that they kept veto rights on any acquisition as they raised capital, and that they plan to accept only capital that lets them keep those rights. He also wrote that the core business model makes money, so the company can switch to profitability whenever it chooses. The full letter is We're Not Going Anywhere.
Stores your size. Typical implementation runs about one month, and our largest clients, with 30 or more locations, can take up to a year to fully roll out, as described in what happens when you switch. Multi-store operators like Clements Paint in Austin run on Rundoo, and King's Paint and Paper moves inventory between its locations inside the system.
Your data. You own your data, and it is exportable any time, in any format, through the report builder, as our FAQ states. It lives in Google Cloud in a managed database with point-in-time recovery, copied across multiple data centers, so it is not sitting on one machine in your back room.
Support. Support is US-based and included in your subscription, with no reseller in between, and Rundoo resolves 96% of cases within 24 hours. If a store wants to check any of this against a real owner, ask your rep to connect you with a client who runs a store like yours.
