The scenario is so ordinary that you stop seeing it.
A student enrols. They complete phase 1, get their learner's licence, do two or three outings. Then they cancel a session. Then another. Then they stop answering messages.
Six months pass. A year. Their file is still there, open, sitting among your active students.
This isn't a rare case. With a thirteen-month minimum program, a school accumulates these files mechanically: the longer the relationship, the more opportunities it has to break. A school following 80 students almost certainly has several.
And it's a bigger problem than a cluttered list.
Why a file "in limbo" costs you something
As long as the contract isn't formally closed, three things stay true at once:
You can't compute your retention obligation. The seven-year requirement runs from the end of the service contract — not from the last lesson taken. If the contract was never closed, it has no end date, so it has no computable deadline. The file will sit there indefinitely, not because you decided it should, but because nothing ever triggers its removal.
You're holding personal information with no clear basis. Name, date of birth, address, learner's licence number, a parent's contact details if the student is a minor. Under Law 25, that information shouldn't be kept longer than necessary. A file abandoned two years ago is no longer "necessary" for much — but it still commits you.
Your numbers are wrong. An inactive student counted among your active ones distorts your real capacity, your progress tracking, and your completion statistics. You're making decisions on numbers describing a reality that no longer exists.
The real problem: nobody closes a contract the client walked away from
This is where the mechanics of the gap hide.
A normal cancellation leaves a trace: the client asks, you process it, a date appears. A silent abandonment produces nothing at all. There's no event, no form, no action to take — so nothing gets recorded.
The file isn't misfiled. It's waiting on an action nobody has a reason to perform.
That's why these files never resolve themselves, and why they're almost always discovered at the worst moment: during a verification, or while trying to work out why the active-student count doesn't match anything.
What to actually do
The goal isn't to "delete" the file — that would be wrong, and probably contrary to your retention obligation. The goal is to close it, which means giving it an end date.
1. Decide on an inactivity threshold. Six months with no session and no reply is a reasonable starting point for a program spanning thirteen months. The exact number matters less than the fact that it exists and applies to everyone.
2. Attempt a documented contact. An email or message, keeping the record of sending it. This isn't empty formality: it's what separates a closure supported by a process from a unilateral one.
3. Close the contract with an explicit date. This is the central act. That date becomes the start of your seven years, and it turns an undetermined file into an ordinary one with a computable deadline.
4. Archive rather than delete. The file must remain kept and consultable for the required period. What changes is its status: it leaves your active students, stops appearing in your tracking, and is locked against routine edits.
5. Record who decided, and when. A closure is an administrative decision. If it's questioned in three years, the answer needs to exist somewhere other than your memory.
Calculate the file's deadline
Once the contract end date is set, the deadline becomes computable:
The calculation runs entirely in your browser. The date you enter is never sent anywhere.
That's exactly what closing the file makes possible. Before, that field was empty, and the file could have no exit date at all.
"Paused" and "abandoned" are not the same thing
Worth separating clearly, because treating them identically is how schools end up closing files they shouldn't.
A pause is declared. The student tells you they're stopping for a while — exams, a move, money, an injury. There's an intention to return, and often a rough horizon. That file should stay open, with the pause and its reason recorded. Closing it would be wrong, and would irritate a customer who did exactly what you asked by telling you.
An abandonment is silent. No message, no reply, no stated intention. What makes it different isn't the elapsed time — it's the absence of any signal.
The practical consequence: your inactivity threshold should only apply to the second category. A student who told you they'd be back in September isn't inactive in the sense that matters, even if they haven't taken a session in four months.
This is also why the documented contact attempt is more than a formality. It's the step that converts an ambiguous situation into a clear one: either they answer, and you learn which category they're in, or they don't, and the silence is itself the answer you needed.
Recording the distinction costs almost nothing and prevents the most annoying version of this problem — closing the file of someone who was always planning to come back.
And if they come back?
They do, and that's precisely why "delete" is never the right answer.
A student resuming after eighteen months raises a legitimate question: what remains valid from their earlier progress? The sessions they took exist. Their learner's licence, though, may have expired in the meantime — which is very common, since the program runs over a year.
A properly archived file answers those questions. A deleted file forces starting over, and a file left open in a vague state says neither where they stopped nor why.
The takeaway
- An abandoned file isn't neutral: it blocks the retention calculation and leaves you holding data with no clear basis.
- The problem isn't negligence — it's that no event triggers the closure of a contract the client walked away from.
- The useful act is setting an end date, not deleting.
- Archive, don't erase: the retention obligation keeps running.
- A written inactivity threshold, applied to everyone, beats a case-by-case decision made two years too late.
For the exact termination terms applicable to your standard contract, refer to the service contract itself and, if needed, to the SAAQ.