Leaving Civica/Earnie - Data retention

[mulderite]

We have been using Earnie for a good few years now, but the Finance team have now made the jump and moved to Access Education. This has raised an issue with retaining the transnactional data held within the old software. Civica have quoted us a significant sum to give us what they call a 'read only' licence so that we can still have access to our data for the next 6 years. It doesn't seem there is a way to extract the data from Earnie ourselves (or I haven't yet been able to find a way), so at the moment we are faced with potentially paying Civica thousands of pounds to retain access to our data.

 

What are other schools doing when changing financial and payroll systems – how do they deal with storing data for 6 years without paying considerable read-only license fees?