What counts as operational data
The record of how your business communicated, decided and executed: chat, email, documents, tickets, code, CRM activity, job records, meeting recordings and the accounting trail behind them. Buyers pay for the working record, not the finished outputs: the thread that argued a decision through is worth more than the final deck that announced it.
In scope
- Internal chat and email between your own people
- Documents, drafts and version history your staff produced
- Tickets, jobs, quotes, invoices and the notes attached to them
- Code, pull requests, issues and commit history
- CRM activity: calls logged, deals moved, notes written
- Meeting recordings and transcripts
Out of scope, or removed
- Material you hold for clients under their agreements: excluded at extraction
- Licensed third-party content and purchased datasets
- Personal information: irreversibly removed across 60+ identifier types before any buyer sees anything
- Content already published on the open web: adds volume, not price
Guides by system. Step-by-step pages for the systems we are asked about most: where the count lives, what to type in, and the vendor's own export route.
Team chat
| System | Where the count lives | Unit |
|---|
| Slack | Workspace analytics shows messages sent and active channels. Private channels count on Business+ and above. | Messages |
| Microsoft Teams | Usage reports in the Microsoft 365 admin centre cover recent activity; longer history is visible through Purview search. | Messages |
| Google Chat | Chat reports in the Google Admin console; Vault shows message volume across the organisation. | Messages |
Email and files
| System | Where the count lives | Unit |
|---|
| Google Workspace (Gmail, Drive) | Storage per user and in total under Reports in the Admin console. Drive shows shared drive sizes separately. | GB |
| Microsoft 365 (Outlook, SharePoint, OneDrive) | Mailbox usage, SharePoint site usage and OneDrive usage reports in the admin centre, each with totals and per-user figures. | GB |
| Dropbox | Team storage in the admin console, with member and shared-folder breakdowns. | GB |
CRM
| System | Where the count lives | Unit |
|---|
| HubSpot | Record counts per object (contacts, companies, deals, tickets) under the data model and limits settings. | Records |
| Salesforce | Storage Usage in Setup lists record counts by object and total data storage. | Records |
| Pipedrive, Zoho CRM | List views show totals per object; account storage pages show overall size. | Records |
Jobs and field service
| System | Where the count lives | Unit |
|---|
| simPRO, ServiceM8, Tradify, AroFlo, Fergus | Jobs, quotes and invoices are totalled in the reports area or the list view of each; most show the date range so years of history are read off directly. | Jobs |
| Procore, Buildertrend | Project lists and grid views carry counts; per-project archives show document and photo volume. | Records |
Accounting and payroll
| System | Where the count lives | Unit |
|---|
| Xero | Account Transactions and the Journal report, filtered by financial year, give transaction volume; the organisation start date gives years. | Transactions |
| MYOB | Transaction journal and sales or purchases registers by date range. | Transactions |
| QuickBooks | Transaction list and audit log by date range. | Transactions |
| Employment Hero, KeyPay, Deputy | Employee counts and pay-run or shift history from the reports area. Headcount by role is useful on the intake; payslips themselves are not in scope. | Employees |
Customer support
| System | Where the count lives | Unit |
|---|
| Zendesk | Ticket totals in Explore, or the ticket count on any filtered view. | Tickets |
| Intercom, Freshdesk, Help Scout | Conversation or ticket volume in the reports area, by date range. | Conversations |
Projects and wiki
| System | Where the count lives | Unit |
|---|
| Jira | Any JQL search returns a work item count; an empty query counts everything. | Issues |
| Asana, Trello, monday.com, ClickUp | Task or card totals in reporting or workspace settings; board exports show counts. | Tasks |
| Notion, Confluence | Confluence shows storage in site administration. Notion has no storage meter: the page count in each teamspace and the workspace creation date are enough. | Pages |
Source code
| System | Where the count lives | Unit |
|---|
| GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket | Repository count and size from organisation settings; issues and pull or merge requests are totalled on their list pages. | Repositories |
Meetings and calls
| System | Where the count lives | Unit |
|---|
| Zoom | Recording management lists cloud recordings with duration and storage used. | Hours |
| Google Meet, Microsoft Teams | Recordings land in the organiser's Drive or OneDrive; the storage reports above include them. | Hours |
| RingCentral, Aircall, Dialpad | Call logs with duration in the admin portal; recording retention varies by plan, so check how far back they go. | Hours |
Commerce and analytics
| System | Where the count lives | Unit |
|---|
| Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce | Order, customer and product totals in analytics or the orders list, by date range. | Orders |
| Google Analytics 4 | Event counts in the Events report; property creation date gives years. Analytics is low in value on its own and high alongside the rest. | Events |
Years matter more than size
For every system, note when it started and whether there were gaps or migrations. Seven continuous years in eight connected systems is the strong zone. A system that was cancelled and purged is usually gone for good, which is why anyone winding a business down, or advising one, should preserve SaaS access before doing anything else. The practitioner's guide covers that order of operations for appointments.
Estimates are enough. The intake is a screen, not an audit: a count from the admin console and a start year per system is all it takes to tell you whether an assessment is worth running.
Where a count lives changes as vendors move their admin consoles around. If a system you run is not listed, enter your best estimate; the screen call sorts out the rest.