Use case · Freelancer
The freelancer or sole trader winding up
Ten years of solo practice, one hundred and twenty clients, two mailboxes, a portfolio online. You stop because you change paths. Yet the accounting and tax obligations still run for another decade. How to close down without burning what you have built.
The setting
You have been freelancing — as a sole trader, EIRL or micro-entrepreneur — for ten years. You have served around a hundred clients: a few recurring contracts, many short assignments, a public portfolio you have kept up to date. You decide to stop, out of fatigue or to change direction: employment, a contract-free pause, another activity. You declare cessation through the INPI single-window service; a few weeks later you receive removal from the SIRENE register.
On the accounting and tax side, you know what to do: final declaration, last URSSAF payments, last balance sheet or BNC return. On the digital side, you improvise. You have piled up ten years of records — invoices, quotes, client deliverables, email exchanges — across Gmail, Drive, Notion and Stripe accounts you vaguely plan to close “in a few months”.
The trouble is that those “few months” turn into years. In the meantime, you keep paying for the subscriptions, you keep receiving messages, and your accounting obligations — ten years after the last invoice — keep running. The fate of those archives is neither a souvenir nor mere technical debt: it is an open file.
A freelancer who closes down has no court-appointed administrator, no co-shareholders, no team to handle what comes next. Everything rests on them — which is precisely why archives should be entrusted to a third party that outlives the cessation.
- 10 years of activity
- ~120 clients served
- ~30 GB of archives
- 10 years accounting retention
What is at stake
- Accounting records. French Commercial Code art. L. 123-22 mandates ten years of retention for BIC; BNC follows comparable logic. The obligation persists after registry removal: it is you, personally, who will have to produce the records in case of a tax or social-security audit.
- Client deliverables. Depending on your status and contracts, some clients keep a right of use or recovery over delivered files. Without structured deposit, five years from now you will have neither the files nor the associated contracts to answer a legitimate request.
- The professional inbox. Whether a personal address used for work or a dedicated domain, in both cases follow-ups keep arriving after cessation — administrations, former clients, payment platforms. Without email continuity, you miss a URSSAF summons by oversight.
- The public portfolio. Ten years of SEO on your name and trade. Its disappearance cuts former clients and peers off from any information about you. For a possible return to activity or a comeback, it is an asset worth preserving.
- Personal data inside SaaS tools. Stripe, Notion, Drive, Slack accounts — services that hold your data and whose unilateral deletion also destroys accounting-relevant items. A structured export upstream avoids irreversible losses.
How Archivum operates
- 1
Scoping the case
Legal status (sole trader, EIRL, micro-entrepreneur), archive perimeter, retention duration per stratum (accounting, deliverables, mail), access grant — yourself, possibly a spouse or accountant. Detailed quote, then a template contract adapted to sole-trader cases.
- 2
Extraction and deposit
Accounting export (PDF invoices, journals), exports from the SaaS tools you use (Stripe, Notion, Drive), email archives in mbox format, client deliverables indexed by file. Storage on sovereign French infrastructure, cryptographic fingerprint for each item.
- 3
Portfolio frozen as static
Your portfolio site is regenerated as static HTML and migrated to Scaleway behind Cloudflare. The domain is kept. A clear landing message states that the activity has ceased and points to you for follow-up. See site continuity.
- 4
Email taken over inbound-only
Critical mailboxes are taken over in inbound-only mode. No outgoing mail. You — and only you, unless another grantee is named — read incoming correspondence through a secure channel.
- 5
Conservation contracted by stratum
The contract sets differentiated archive durations: 10 years for accounting, 5 years for client contracts, 3 years for prospecting. Each stratum has its own arbitration at term.
- 6
End-of-period arbitration
Three months before each deadline, you are notified. You decide between extension, deletion and transfer. In the absence of a decision within the period, the contractual default scenario applies — see end-of-period arbitration.
Five years on
You decide alone, or with your spouse if you have named them as a digital successor in the contract.
Extension
To align with residual accounting obligations (up to ten years after the last close).
Deletion
Secure destruction of the strata whose retention is no longer required. Certificate issued for your personal records.
Transfer to the trustee
Archivum inherits contractually the domain name and public portfolio, releasing the former freelancer from future charges.
How much it costs
For a typical sole-trader case — 10 years of history, ~30 GB of archives, a 30-page portfolio, two mailboxes — over five to ten years, the order of magnitude is a few hundred euros per year. Pricing tiers down by volume and duration. The marginal cost of the static portfolio is minimal (a few euros per month). The final price is set in a quote after scoping.
Scope your case
The most efficient path is to talk for an hour before filing the cessation. We understand your freelance context, we validate a perimeter, you walk away with a scoped quote aligned with the legal retention periods you remain personally bound by.