How to cancel your business?
Short answerTo close a service business, notify customers with a final date, finish or refund open jobs and prepaid plans, collect or write off balances, export your records, cancel subscriptions and processors, and follow your state's steps for dissolving the business. A customer and data checklist keeps loose ends from becoming complaints.
The explanation
Begin with customers. Send a clear notice with the last service date, tell prepaid or membership customers how they will be refunded or served, and where possible recommend another provider. Complete or hand off open jobs so no one is left half served.
Then settle money. Send final invoices, collect what is owed, issue refunds, and pay vendors and staff. Cancel automatic card charges and recurring invoices, and keep copies of every settlement in writing.
Finally, keep the records. Export customers, jobs, invoices and tax reports before you close software accounts, and keep them for the period your accountant advises. Dissolving the business, final tax filings and licenses depend on your state and structure, so ask your accountant or the state's business office. A short written note to each supplier ends standing orders cleanly.
Steps
- Send customers a notice with a last service date and refund plan.
- Finish, hand off or refund every open job and prepaid plan.
- Collect balances, pay vendors and staff, and stop recurring charges.
- Export customer, job, invoice and tax records.
- Cancel subscriptions and follow your state's dissolution steps.
What to watch for
- Closing software before exporting records.
- Leaving prepaid customers without a refund plan.
How Apex does it
In progress
Part of this is built. The rest is not. Status as of 2026-10-07; the badge shows the least-built feature involved.
Apex is designed to export your data on cancel, export customers to CSV at any time and export any report to CSV. Report export is built; customer export and data export on cancel are in progress.
- AD10Data export on cancel(In progress)
- LD16Customer export (CSV) at any time(In progress)
- RP14Export any report to CSV(Built)
Apex Flow Scheduler is in early access. See how we label status.
Where this question comes from: owners type it, or a close variant, into search boxes. It was returned by public search suggestions (Google, Bing or DuckDuckGo) when we collected them on 2026-10-06. We do not have search volumes.