Who to hire to move off Quip before the 2027 cut-off

The honest advice about hiring a Quip partner is that most of the work you would once have hired for is gone. Nobody should be implementing Quip for a new team, and any firm that offers to do so should be asked why. What remains is a time-boxed exit with a hard edge on it, and the skills for an exit are different from the skills for an implementation: counting what you have, deciding what it should become, moving it with its permissions, rebuilding what cannot move, and proving that nothing was lost.

Salesforce completed its acquisition of Quip on 26 August 2016, and for years it was the document layer beside Salesforce: account plans, mutual close plans and meeting notes embedded on records. In March 2026 Salesforce Ben reported that "Salesforce has announced that all Quip products are being retired, and any subscriptions cannot be renewed after March 1, 2027." Quip's own pricing page carries a related note about packaging: "Starter cannot be purchased or combined with Quip for Salesforce." You should confirm the dates for your own subscription in your contract and with your Salesforce account team, because the date that matters to you is the end of your current term. The costs of the move, and what the replacement licences cost, are on Quip Salesforce implementation cost. What follows is how to choose the person or firm.

#What you are really hiring for

An exit has six pieces of work, and a proposal should name each.

Inventory. How many documents, spreadsheets, folders, templates and chat threads exist, who owns them and when they were last edited. Which of them are dead and can be archived without conversion. Which are embedded in Salesforce, by record page component, template or automation.

Decision. For each class of content, where will it live? Candidates include a Slack canvas, a Salesforce record with fields and related lists, a file in Salesforce, a knowledge article, or an archive in a document store.

Conversion. Moving what can be moved. Slack's help states plainly: "Bulk document conversion isn’t supported at this time." People convert individual Quip documents once the two products are connected, and converted documents become read-only. A partner needs a plan for that one-at-a-time constraint, such as assigning owners to convert their own documents on a schedule, with a tracker.

Rebuild. Recreating the embedded experience in Salesforce. An account plan that used to be a live Quip document on the account page needs to become structured fields, related lists and tasks, a canvas in a linked channel, or both.

Archive. Retaining what a legal or records policy requires, with metadata and permissions intact enough to be defensible.

Switch-off. Removing Quip components from page layouts, deactivating automation that called Quip's APIs, and confirming that nothing still points at it.

#The credentials, and why they are different this time

As at October 2026 we found no Quip-specific credential on Trailhead, and you should treat a firm that claims one with caution. The skills that matter are adjacent.

For the Salesforce rebuild, look for Salesforce Certified Platform Administrator or Platform App Builder on the person who will recreate page layouts, fields and flows. For anything that touches code, such as automation that called Quip's APIs, look for Platform Developer skills. For the Slack side, the relevant credential is Salesforce Certified Slack Administrator, and the Slack Consultant credential is useful for change management across teams. Hire a Slack partner covers those credentials in more detail.

#Red flags specific to Quip

A proposal that implements. Any scope that sets up new Quip sites, templates or Live Apps should be rejected unless there is a short, documented reason, for instance a few months of overlap for a team that cannot move early.

A promise to migrate everything automatically. Salesforce Ben's report says Salesforce is building an in-product flow for converting documents to canvases and tools for exporting content. Slack's own help says bulk conversion is not supported at this time. A partner who promises a one-click full migration is either using tools you have not seen or not telling you about the manual work. Ask which.

No decision about spreadsheets. Quip held spreadsheets as well as documents. Ask how each will be handled, because a canvas is not a spreadsheet. The answer might be a file, a Salesforce report, an external spreadsheet tool or a rebuild into fields.

Ignoring embedded behaviour. The expensive part of a Quip exit is usually the Salesforce side. A proposal that discusses documents and not record pages, templates and automation has missed it.

Permissions treated as an afterthought. A converted document that is visible to more people than before is a data leak. A partner should say how access will be mapped and tested.

No date discipline. Salesforce Ben's report describes a read-only period of 90 days after a term ends, then blocked logins, then data deletion. Treat those as reported details to confirm in your own contract, and plan to finish well before they matter. A proposal with no calendar working back from your term end is not an exit plan.

#A realistic first engagement

Start with a two-to-three week assessment, and make it fixed price. The deliverables are an inventory with usage and ownership, a content map that proposes a destination for each class of content, a list of every Salesforce component and automation that touches Quip, a risk list covering permissions, retention and spreadsheets, and a dated plan that works back from your term end date.

Then pilot one team. Choose a team that depends on Quip but has a manageable number of documents, such as a sales team using account plans. Have the partner move that team end to end: convert the documents that convert, rebuild the account plan as a Salesforce page, train the team, and switch their Quip usage off. Measure what took longer than the plan said. The pilot will teach you what the remaining teams will cost in time, and you should resist signing a fixed price for the rest before you have seen it.

If your estate is mostly structured content, think about whether part of it should become Salesforce data and not a canvas at all. Account plans have a structured half: objectives, contacts, risks, next steps. Those are fields, related records and tasks. Moving them into Salesforce lets you report on them, which the documents never allowed. What happened to Slack and should I migrate from Slack are useful background if Slack is the destination.

#Ten questions for a bid or interview

1. What is your plan for a one-by-one conversion constraint, and who does the converting?
2. How will you inventory our Quip estate, and what will the inventory show us that we do not know?
3. How will you find every place Quip is embedded in Salesforce, including templates and automation?
4. What will you do with spreadsheets?
5. How will you preserve or map permissions, and how will you test that nothing became more visible?
6. Which content do you recommend we archive without converting, and who signs off?
7. What is the dated plan working back from our term end date, and what is the first thing that could slip?
8. What do we keep for legal or records purposes, and in what format?
9. Where would you put structured content such as account plans, and why?
10. What do you hand over, and what do we need to check after Quip is switched off?

#Checking references and evidence

Because the exit is time-boxed, references from similar migrations matter more than usual. Ask for a client who moved off a collaboration tool, not necessarily Quip, and ask them how the plan compared with reality. Ask what proportion of content was archived and not moved, how complaints about lost content were handled, and whether anyone found a missing document months later.

Request artefacts. An inventory template, a content map, a conversion tracker, a rebuild specification for a record page and a switch-off checklist are the working documents of a competent team. Request one that has been sanitised. A partner without them will be making their method up on your project.

Be cautious about vendor blogs that offer migration tools or services as a neutral guide. Some are useful and some are marketing. Judge a firm on its method and on the questions it asks you, not on a comparison chart it wrote itself.

#Commercial models and the statement of work

A fixed price assessment, then a fixed price per team or per content class once the pilot has shown real effort, tends to work best. Time and materials with a cap suits the archive and unknown embedded automation. Avoid a single fixed price for the whole exit signed before the inventory exists, because both sides are guessing.

The statement of work should list content classes and the target for each, the teams and their order, the Salesforce components to rebuild, the acceptance tests, including a permissions test, and the date by which each team must be finished. It should say that inventories, content maps, trackers and rebuild specifications are yours. It should state what the partner will do if conversion tooling changes or if Salesforce adjusts dates, and who decides. It should include a record of what was archived and where, and a short period after switch-off for fixing missing items. Keep the replacement licence conversation separate: see the Quip licence guide and the cost page linked above.

#What a good exit plan looks like on the calendar

Work backwards from your term end date in four blocks. The first is assessment and decisions, which should finish within the first month so that owners know where their content is going. The second is conversion and rebuild, run team by team, with the highest-risk teams first because their problems will take longest to surface. The third is a freeze, a period in which Quip is read only for the teams that have moved, so that late edits are caught before anyone relies on the new home. The fourth is archive and switch-off, with a final check that every embedded component and automation has been removed.

Build slack into the plan. Conversion is a one-document-at-a-time activity that depends on busy owners, and spreadsheets and permissions always take longer than estimated. A partner who shows a plan with no float, or who will not name the first thing likely to slip, has not done this before. Ask who in your own business owns each content class, because a partner can coach conversion but cannot decide on your behalf what a legal team must retain.

#When you do not need a partner

If your Quip use is light, with a few dozen documents that a handful of people own, you can run the exit yourselves: connect Quip and Slack, ask the owners to convert their documents, export what you want to keep, and remove any components from page layouts. If Quip was only a notepad and nothing is embedded, a partner adds little.

You need help when Quip is wired into page layouts and automation, when hundreds of people depend on shared documents, when records or legal retention applies, when spreadsheets carry real logic, or when your term end is close and your team has no capacity. In those cases the best thing a partner can do is make the dates visible on day one.