THE RECORD DOESN'T
STOP AT THE CLOSE.
The deal is won — and from here your CRM knows nothing. In CMP42 the deal becomes a project, and the project carries what applies afterwards: contract, DPA, data categories, retention.
WON. AND THEN WHAT?
A deal reaching Closed Won is the last thing most CRMs have to say about it. The stage is set, the forecast is updated, the record goes quiet. Everything that legally begins at that moment begins somewhere else.
The contract is in SharePoint. The data processing agreement is in a folder someone in legal maintains. The retention period is in nobody's head, which is a polite way of saying it is in an e-mail from 2024. And the question an auditor asks — on what basis are you still holding this person's data, and until when? — has to be answered by reconstruction, from three systems and one memory.
That is not a tooling gap you can close with a custom property. It is a different legal regime than the one that applied before the close, and it needs its own object.
WHAT THE PROJECT CARRIES.
A project is an object in its own right in the Podma Workbench, with its own fields — not three custom properties bolted onto the deal and a naming convention everyone forgets.
Its own columns
- Contract reference, contract signed, contract end — what was agreed, from when, until when.
- DPA reference — the data processing agreement that governs this engagement (Art. 28 GDPR).
- Data categories and special categories — what kind of data this project touches, with Art. 9 called out separately because it is treated separately.
- Retention policy, retention until, legal hold — how long, until when, and whether something has frozen that answer.
Its own edges
- Back to the deal it came from — so the commercial history stays reachable from the delivery, and nobody reconstructs it from a folder name.
- To the contracting party — who the counterparty is for this agreement, which is not always who signed the purchase order.
- To the people, by role — sponsor, stakeholder, team. "Who do we ask about this" becomes a question you answer by filtering, not by asking around.
THE AUDIT QUESTION BECOMES A QUERY.
Because the project sits in the same graph as the people and the company, the question stops being archaeology. Which projects are past their retention date? Which hold Art. 9 data and under which DPA? Which people are attached to a project that is still running, and which to one that ended two years ago?
Each of those is a filter in the Podma Workbench or a read over MCP. Not a report somebody builds, and not an export somebody reconciles. And every change to any of those fields carries its version, time and source in the change log, which is the part that matters when the question is asked a year later.
- A retention date you can filter on, not one you remember.
- Art. 9 categories declared on the project, not inferred from the industry.
- The DPA reachable from the person, through typed edges.
- Every change attributable, with time and source.
THE RETENTION DATE REFUSES.
A field that records a retention period is documentation. A field that stops a deletion is a control. CMP42 does the second: a removal is refused while a legal hold is set, or while the retention date is still in the future.1 The refusal is written to the change log as an event, so the thing you can show an auditor is not the policy but the moment the system enforced it.
That matters in both directions. Art. 17(3)(b) GDPR exempts data you are legally required to keep, and §257 HGB and §147 AO are what make that requirement concrete for German companies. A system that happily erases a record under legal hold is not GDPR-compliant; it is just obedient.
¹ Planned for the next release.
WHAT THIS DOES — AND DOES NOT.
CMP42 is in Alpha. The project object is built and running; the line below is where it stops, in plain terms.
What works today
- A project is its own object with its own fields for contract, data processing agreement, data categories, Art. 9 categories, retention policy, retention date and legal hold.
- Typed edges lead back to the deal, the company and the people involved, each with its own validity period.
- Every change is in the change log with version, time and source.
- You can filter and read it like anything else in the workbench — or let an agent read it over MCP.
What it is not
- Not a document store. Contract reference and DPA reference are references. The files stay where your legal team keeps them.
- No deadline arithmetic and no reminders. A retention date is a date you can filter on, not a scheduler.
- No workflow. What happens when a project ends is your process; CMP42 records it rather than driving it.
- The interface does not yet show German field labels. They are declared in the registry; the surface still shows the English names.
Bring the awkward project to the call.
The one where the contract ended, the data did not, and nobody is quite sure which agreement covers it. Fifteen minutes, no slide deck.
→ Apply to be a Design Partner