"Exiting a facility: the decommission cascade"

What exiting a facility does

Every facility in Verinode is a hub that other records attach to: its lease, its compliance calendar, its consumable stock, its recurring costs, and any equipment stored there. When you actually give up a location (the lease ends, you sell the building, you consolidate two branches into one), closing that record cleanly means more than flipping a status field. Equipment still shows the old address. A lease is still marked active. Recurring costs keep accruing on paper long after you stopped paying them. Compliance events keep counting down to due dates nobody is going to meet, because there's no building left to inspect.

Exiting a facility is Verinode's single, deliberate action for retiring a location the right way. Click it once, and every linked record that needs to change, changes together, on the same exit date, in the same action. Nothing about your business data is deleted: every record involved stays in your history for audit, it's just no longer active.

Verinode doesn't decide when to exit a facility. You do, when the lease is up or the location is closing. What Verinode does is make sure that one decision correctly cascades through every record that depended on that address, instead of leaving you to remember and update five different places by hand.

Where to find it

Open Facilities from the sidebar, at /facilities. Click into any facility from the Footprint tab (or from Recently added on the Facilities home) to open its profile. At the bottom left of the profile, in read mode, a red text link reads Exit facility. That's the only path to retiring a facility, there's no separate "archive" button anywhere else in the section, and no way to exit a facility from the Footprint list itself, you have to be inside its profile.

The Exit facility link only appears in the profile's read mode. If you're mid-edit (having clicked Edit on the facility's name, type, or address), switch back to read mode first, the footer swaps to Save/Cancel controls while you're editing.

The Exit modal

Clicking Exit facility opens a confirmation modal titled Exit "<facility name>". It exists specifically so you see the full blast radius before you commit, nothing cascades until you click the final confirm button.

The modal reads: "This decommissions the property and cascades through linked records. The data isn't deleted, everything stays in history for audit." That's the core promise: exiting is a status change with cleanup attached, not a deletion.

Exit date

A single required date field, defaulting to today. This one date drives three separate things in the cascade:

• It's the date recurring costs get end-dated to.
• It's baked into the note Verinode writes on the terminated lease ("Property exited <date>. Lease terminated as part of decommissioning workflow.").
• It's the vacate date the auto-scheduled move-out inspection counts backward from (14 days earlier).

If you've already moved out, backdate it to the actual vacate day rather than leaving today's date, so the cost end-dating and the move-out inspection line up with what actually happened. Leaving the date blank blocks the action entirely: the modal shows "Exit date is required." and won't submit.

"What this will do"

Below the date field, a bordered panel lists the exact cascade that's about to run, built live from the specific facility's data so you're never confirming a generic warning. Each line only appears if it applies:

• Equipment. If any equipment is currently assigned to this location, a line reads "N equipment units will be released back to the pool (storage Property cleared)" (or "1 equipment unit" for a single item). If nothing is stored here, this line is omitted.
• Lease. If the facility has an active lease, a line reads "Active lease will be marked terminated." Omitted if there's no active lease on file.
• Recurring costs. If any recurring cost lines are still active (no end date, or an end date in the future), a line reads "N recurring cost lines will end-date on the exit date" (or "1 recurring cost line" for a single line). Omitted if there are none.
• Compliance. If any compliance events are open (status Scheduled or Overdue), a line reads "N open compliance events will be waived" (or "1 open compliance event"). Completed events aren't touched and don't count toward this line.
• Move-out inspection. This line always appears, regardless of what else is on the facility: "A move-out inspection event will auto-schedule 14 days before the exit date."

If a facility has no equipment, no active lease, no active costs, and no open compliance events, only that last line shows, exiting a bare-bones facility record still schedules the move-out inspection.

Confirming

Two buttons in the footer: Cancel, which closes the modal with no changes made, and a red Exit property button that runs the cascade. While it's running the button reads "Exiting…" and is disabled, along with the date field, so you can't submit twice. If something goes wrong, an error message appears in red above the footer and the facility is left as it was, nothing partially applied is presented as a success.

You can't exit the same facility twice: if you somehow reopen the modal for a facility that's already been exited, the action is rejected with "This facility is already exited."

The cascade, step by step

Once you confirm, six things happen, in this order, all scoped to your operator account so nothing outside your own data is ever touched:

1. 1Equipment is released back to the pool. Every piece of equipment assigned to this facility has its facility assignment cleared. The equipment itself isn't deleted or deactivated, it just no longer shows this address as its storage location. Any free-text location note you'd separately typed on the equipment record is untouched. This is the step that prevents you from later staring at your equipment list wondering why three pieces of gear are still "at" a building you don't have anymore.
2. 2The active lease is terminated. If there was an active lease, its status flips to terminated and a note is appended recording the exit date and that it closed via the decommissioning workflow. The lease record itself stays in your history in full, rent, term dates, escalation terms, and all, it's just no longer the active lease for this location.
3. 3Active recurring costs are end-dated. Every recurring cost on this facility that didn't already have an end date, or whose end date was still in the future, gets its end date set to the exit date. The cost rows aren't deleted, they simply stop accruing past that date, the same way any other recurring cost naturally winds down.
4. 4Open compliance events are waived. Any compliance event still sitting as Scheduled or Overdue gets marked Waived, with a note recording the exit date and the reason. A completed inspection or certificate from before the exit isn't touched, it stays Completed in your history exactly as it was.
5. 5A move-out inspection is scheduled. Verinode inserts a new compliance event, type Move-out Inspection, due 14 days before your exit date, so you get a heads-up reminder ahead of the actual vacate day rather than discovering the walkthrough needs to happen the same week you're leaving. It's created with status Scheduled, and its note records the vacate date it was built from. If the date math can't be computed for some reason, Verinode skips this one step rather than failing the whole exit, everything else in the cascade still completes.
6. 6The facility itself closes. Its status is set to Exited and it's soft-deleted, meaning it drops off the Footprint list and out of every active count on the Facilities home (the hero panel, the Explore tiles, the Recently added row), but the underlying record is never actually erased.

Every step above writes to your action history as a single facility.exit entry, recording the exit date and how many equipment units, leases, cost lines, and compliance events it touched, along with the ID of the move-out inspection it created (if one was). That's the audit trail if you ever need to reconstruct exactly what changed and when.

What "exited" looks like afterward

Once the cascade completes, the facility profile closes and you land back on Home. From there:

• The facility no longer appears on the Footprint tab. Footprint only ever lists the facilities still on active record, that's a hard filter, not a status you can toggle back on from the list.
• The Active Footprint headline on Home, and the ownership and square footage stats beside it, no longer count this facility.
• Any equipment that was stored here now shows no facility assignment. It still exists in your equipment records; you'll want to reassign it to wherever it actually landed (a different facility, a truck, storage) the next time you're in the Equipment section.
• The terminated lease, the end-dated costs, and the waived compliance events are all still visible if you go looking for them, they're history now rather than active items, but nothing about them was deleted.
• A new Move-out Inspection event sits on your compliance calendar, due 14 days ahead of the exit date you set, so it's the one thing this facility still has open even after everything else closed.

There is currently no undo. Exiting is designed to be the deliberate, final step you take once a facility is genuinely closing, not a toggle to flip back on. If you're not sure whether a location is truly done (a temporary closure for renovation, for example), the Under Renovation or Inactive status options on the facility's own Edit form are the right tool, they change how the facility reads without touching a single linked record. Save Exit for locations you are actually giving up.

Archive vs exit

Verinode's internal codebase does keep a lower-level "archive" action, one that flips a facility's status without touching anything attached to it, but it isn't wired to any button you can click. The reason is deliberate: a bare archive would leave equipment still pointed at a location you no longer control, a lease still reading Active for a building you've vacated, and compliance events still counting down for inspections that will never happen. That's a worse state than the facility being active, not a better one.

So in practice, for every facility you work with, exit is archive. There's one path to retiring a location, and it always does the full cascade above. You're never choosing between "just archive it" and "exit it properly," Verinode made that choice for you by only building the one that leaves your data consistent.

Best-practice example

Say you're closing a satellite warehouse: two crews' worth of equipment is staged there, the lease has four months left on its notice period, and you're still paying for utilities and pest control on the space. Before clicking Exit facility, walk the equipment list for that facility (from the Footprint row, or the facility's own profile) and note what's there, so once it's released back to the pool you know exactly what needs reassigning to the warehouse or yard it's actually moving to. Set the exit date to your real, agreed vacate date rather than today if you're doing this ahead of time, so the recurring costs end-date correctly and the move-out inspection reminder lands 14 days before you actually have to be out, not 14 days before you happened to click the button.

Related reading

• Facilities: your operator footprint at a glance
• Footprint: the full list of your locations
• Leases: rent, terms, and renewal deadlines
• Lease intelligence: escalations, notice windows, and landlord matching
• Compliance: inspections, COIs, and postings on a calendar
• Understanding your margin
• The decision workspace