Article

What to prepare before you apply

By TrustPast

Published October 30, 2026 · Updated November 1, 2026

Our advice is to put the company on paper before you press apply. When the first question arrives, someone in the office should be able to say how far back the estimating files go. An hour of preparation covers it. This page settles what to gather first: the record systems, their years, rough counts, the contracts, the signature, and what micro1 itself asks at the start.

The short answer

You need a list, not a folder of exports. One page that names each system the company keeps records in, the years it covers, and roughly how much is in it. Add a note on which client contracts limit what you can share, and the name of the person who can sign for the company.

micro1 publishes very little about what it asks at the start, and that keeps the job small. Its estimator asks three questions. Its referral page says the company’s point of contact “sets up the company’s profile on the company portal” and “completes data manifest.” Everything else on this page is our own advice, labelled as ours where it isn’t micro1’s.

One thing to hold on to while you list. micro1 says it “uses de-identified company data.” It isn’t looking for your customer list or your payment records. It says it wants “data that reflects how work is actually performed within an organization.” In a trade company, that’s how an estimate became a job, how a change order was settled, how a repair was diagnosed. Your list should point at those records first.

What happens once the application is in, from the interview to the contract, is on what happens after you apply. The interview itself has its own page: what happens in the initial interview. This page stops at the moment you press the button.

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What micro1 asks at the start

micro1’s payout estimator asks three things. “How many employees does your company have?” “How many years of data do you have?” “Where is your company headquartered?” Under the years question it adds: “Typically the number of years you’ve been in business.” The headquarters answer is one of four: United States, Canada, Europe or Other.

The estimator then shows a range and calls it an “Indicative estimate only.” micro1 says the “Final payout is determined based on data sources, volume, quality, access terms, and due diligence.” Read that list again. Sources, volume and quality are exactly what your inventory describes. Access terms and due diligence come later, but they lean on the same facts.

The next step is the profile and the data manifest. micro1’s referral page says the company’s point of contact sets up the profile through the referral link “and completes data manifest.” micro1 doesn’t publish the manifest’s fields. So we won’t guess at them. A manifest, in the plain sense of the word, is a list of what you hold. If you’ve written the inventory below, you’ll have the answers to hand, whatever the form asks.

micro1 also says something about who applies. “Companies must register and complete their own applications through the referral link.” Nobody can fill this in on your behalf, us included. Our estimate asks similar questions and gives you a range inside micro1’s published band before you start. It’s our range, not micro1’s offer.

Count the employees the way micro1 counts them

micro1’s eligibility line reads: “established companies with 30+ full-time employees, mature business operations, and substantial historical operational data.” Note the word full-time.

Our advice is to count heads on the payroll who work full-time, today. A roofing crew that swells to 60 in July and shrinks to 25 in January has a real number, and it isn’t the July one. Write down the full-time count and, separately, the seasonal peak. If you’re near the line, say so rather than round up. The bar is set out item by item on who qualifies for the data partnership.

List every system that holds records

micro1 names the kinds of records it means: “internal communications, SOPs, project histories, CRM records, support tickets, and other business documentation.” It also says companies “with several years of records across multiple business systems are generally a stronger fit.” Breadth counts, so list every system, not just the main one.

Walk the office in your head, desk by desk. For a trade company, most records sit in six places.

Estimating. The bids, the takeoffs, the revisions, the notes on why the number moved. Some companies price in a dedicated estimating program; some in spreadsheets on a shared drive; some inside the field service software. Write down where each era of bids lives.

Job management or field service. The work orders, the dispatch history, the technician notes, the photos, the job costing. This is often the deepest record a service company has. On ServiceTitan or Jobber, our guides on counting ServiceTitan jobs and reports and counting Jobber quotes and jobs show where the counts are.

Accounting. Invoices, purchase orders, vendor bills, the estimates some firms keep in their books. Most of this is money, and money is not what micro1 says it wants. List the system anyway, because some of its records, such as the line items on an estimate, describe the work. Our page on what a QuickBooks export holds shows what to count there and what never leaves your books.

Email. The threads with general contractors, suppliers, inspectors and the office. This is where change orders were argued and settled. Note the provider and how far back the mailboxes go. The guides on Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 show what to count and where the totals sit.

Chat. Slack, Teams or a group text that the field crews actually use. Chat is where a foreman asked the office how to handle a wall that wasn’t on the drawings. If you’re on Slack, our Slack export guide covers which plan shows what.

CRM and help desk. The leads, the follow-ups, the service requests, the complaints and how each was closed. A help desk such as Zendesk holds years of tickets with the answer under each one. Our Zendesk guide shows how to count them.

Then add the odd ones. The shared drive with the project folders. The safety program. The binder of SOPs someone typed up in 2016. A paper archive in the back room counts as a system too, for the purposes of the list.

Note the years each system covers

The estimator asks one number for years. Your list should hold one per system, because the honest answer is rarely a single date.

Write the first and last year for each. Note the gaps. A typical contractor’s list looks lopsided: estimates in spreadsheets from 2009, a field service program since 2018, email since the domain was set up, Slack since the pandemic. That’s normal, and writing it down shows the depth better than one round number.

Watch for the system you left. A company that moved from one job program to another may still hold the old one’s data, or may lose it when the subscription lapses. Our page on whether old systems count after a switch covers what to keep before access ends. How to count years across those switches, and where the oldest records tend to hide, is on how many years of records count. We won’t repeat it here.

Rough volumes, not exact ones

micro1 says “There’s no fixed minimum number of files, documents, or terabytes.” It says it evaluates “the historical depth, breadth, quality, and relevance of the available data.” So the count is there to describe the record, not to clear a bar.

Rough is enough. Use the counts your systems already show you. The number of jobs or work orders a year. The number of estimates sent, and how many were won. The number of mailboxes and roughly how far back each goes. The number of Slack channels that matter. The number of tickets in the help desk.

Our advice is to round and to say how you counted. “About 4,000 work orders a year since 2018, from the job report” is a better line than a precise figure nobody can check. Don’t ask anyone to export anything to get the number. Every one of the systems above can show a count on screen.

Add one line on quality, in plain words. Do technicians write a sentence on each ticket, or only a status? Do estimators note why a price changed, or only the new price? That line tells micro1 more than the counts do. If the answer is “it varies”, our page on whether messy records still count is worth five minutes.

Who owns the client work

Some of what sits in your systems isn’t yours to share. A commercial client’s drawings, a property manager’s tenant lists, a confidential spec under an NDA. Your list should flag them before you apply, not after.

micro1 says “Companies retain ownership of their underlying data.” That sentence covers what the company owns. It says nothing about what a client owns under contract, and only your contracts answer that.

Our advice is to pull the contracts for your largest clients and any master service agreements, and read two clauses in each: who owns the work product, and what the confidentiality clause covers. Note the clients whose work is out of bounds, and the ones whose contracts are silent. Don’t decide the hard cases alone. Our page on client-owned work and NDAs goes through the reading, and whether you need a lawyer shows how to brief one for that single question.

Who fills it in, and who signs

micro1 asks for a point of contact. It also says “Company representatives must also be able to communicate with the micro1 team in English throughout the partnership and onboarding process.” That covers the whole partnership, not one form.

Our advice is to split two roles. The contact is whoever knows where the records live. In a 60-person electrical contractor that’s usually the operations manager, sometimes the controller. The signer is whoever can bind the company to a contract. In a company with one owner that’s simple. With partners, a board or a family trust, check the operating agreement or bylaws now, not when the contract arrives.

If the signer needs other owners to agree, warn them early. Licensing the company’s records is a decision a co-owner will want a say in, and nobody enjoys finding out from a draft contract. If the company has closed, the question of who can sign is different, and whether a closed company can still license its records covers it.

Count, don’t export

Our advice: count now and export later. micro1’s published order is discovery and pricing, then contracting, then delivery and acceptance. Its referral page says that if micro1 identifies a fit, “the company transfers approved data.” It describes the stretch after the call as “contracting, data transfer, and data approval,” in that order.

So the agreement comes before the transfer, by micro1’s own account. Our advice follows from that: nothing is exported before an agreement says what is shared. The export guides linked above are written with that order in mind. They show you where the counts are for the application, and how the exports work for afterwards.

There’s a second reason to wait. micro1 says delivery happens “through our APIs or other approved methods.” The method is agreed, not chosen by you in advance. An export made today, in a format nobody asked for, can be wasted work.

And don’t tidy. micro1 answers the question of whether a company must anonymize first with “No, micro1 has processes for de-identifying and transforming sensitive information.” It says personal and identifying information “is removed or transformed before your data is shared with third parties.” Scrubbing names by hand, before anyone asks, can strip out the context that makes a record worth anything. The revised estimate and the angry email are the record. For what de-identification does to each kind of file, see how de-identification works.

What to leave off the list

The list describes what you’d consider sharing. Some systems belong on it only as a line that says “out of scope”. As our own advice, these are the usual ones in a trade company.

The payroll system and the HR files. Staff health notes, workers’ comp claims and drug test results. The bank feeds and the card processor. Customer payment details in any form. Anything a client owns under contract, from the step above. Our page on employee personal data covers where staff names turn up in otherwise useful records, such as a technician’s name on every ticket.

Writing these down helps. When the scope conversation comes, you start with a boundary you drew, not one somebody else proposes.

What this means for an electrical contractor

Take a hypothetical electrical contractor of 55 full-time people, our own example and not a list from micro1. Twenty years in business, commercial fit-outs and a service van fleet.

The office manager writes the list in an afternoon. Estimating: spreadsheets on the shared drive from 2006 to 2015, an estimating program since then, about 900 bids a year with revisions. Field service: a job program since 2017, roughly 5,000 work orders a year, technicians’ notes on most of them. Accounting: one system since 2010, listed but marked mostly out of scope. Email: one provider since 2008, 40 mailboxes. Chat: Teams since 2020, a dozen channels that matter. CRM: none apart from the field service program’s customer screens.

The quality line says the project managers write up every change order, and the service techs write a sentence or two per call. The contracts check finds two general contractors whose drawings are confidential, and a hospital client whose site work is under an NDA. Those three go on the list as out of scope. The owner, who holds the company with a brother, calls him before anyone applies.

What micro1 might value in that list, if the fit is there, is the reasoning. The fit-out bid that rose after the walk-through, and the note that says why. The change order for a panel upgrade nobody had priced, and the six emails it took to agree. The tripping breaker that took three visits, with what each visit ruled out. None of it needs a building manager’s name to make sense. Twenty years of it is a record of how an electrical contractor decides.

Worth two minutes to see your range before you write the list? The estimate asks five questions.

What is never included

micro1 publishes how it protects records, not a fixed list of what it refuses. It says “We protect sensitive information through data anonymization and secure handling.” It says that before any participation, it confirms with the company that personal and identifying information “is removed or transformed before your data is shared with third parties,” and that “Raw data is deleted according to an agreed schedule.” Our page on how it’s safe puts those points together.

What follows is TrustPast’s own advice, not micro1’s guidance. Expect these to stay out of scope unless micro1 tells you otherwise: attorney-client privileged records, health information, payment-card and financial-account details, Social Security numbers, minors’ data, biometric data, and classified or export-controlled material. If any of your records sit near those lines, ask micro1 before you apply.

Customer names and payments are never the point. The point is the work. How an estimate became a job, how a change order was settled, how a repair was diagnosed. micro1’s announcement says real business operations “involve incomplete information, competing priorities and exceptions that require judgment.” That judgment is in your job files, not your customer list. The cornerstone page on what data buyers want from a trade business goes through it file by file.

Where we fit

We, TrustPast, write these pages and give you a range with our estimate. You apply to micro1 yourself, through the button below. We never see your list, your files or your contracts. micro1 pays us a referral fee; you pay us nothing. Our page on what TrustPast does, and what it doesn’t sets out where our part ends.

The list, in one place

Before you press apply, as our own advice:

The full-time headcount, and the seasonal peak written separately.
Every system that holds records, with its first and last year and any gaps.
A rough count per system, and one line on how well the work was written down.
The client contracts that put work out of bounds, and the ones that are silent.
The point of contact, and the person who can sign, with any co-owners told.
The systems and folders that stay out, written down as such.

No exports, no scrubbing, no tidying. If the list is longer than you expected, that’s usually good news.

TrustPast

Questions and answers

What does micro1 ask before anything else?

micro1’s payout estimator asks three questions: how many employees the company has, how many years of data it has (“Typically the number of years you’ve been in business”) and where the company is headquartered, from United States, Canada, Europe or Other. Its referral page says the company’s point of contact then sets up the company’s profile on the company portal and completes a data manifest. micro1 doesn’t publish the manifest’s questions.

Do we need to export our records before we apply?

micro1 doesn’t ask for files to apply. Its published order is discovery and pricing, then contracting, then delivery and acceptance, and its referral page says that if micro1 identifies a fit, “the company transfers approved data.” Our own advice is to count what you have and export nothing until an agreement says what is shared.

Is there a minimum amount of records?

micro1 says “There’s no fixed minimum number of files, documents, or terabytes.” It evaluates “the historical depth, breadth, quality, and relevance of the available data,” and says companies “with several years of records across multiple business systems are generally a stronger fit.”

Should we remove customer names first?

No. Asked whether a company needs to anonymize its data before transferring it, micro1 answers: “No, micro1 has processes for de-identifying and transforming sensitive information.” It says personal and identifying information “is removed or transformed before your data is shared with third parties.”

Who should fill in the application?

micro1’s referral page says the company’s point of contact sets up the profile and completes the data manifest, and that “Companies must register and complete their own applications.” micro1 also says company representatives must be able to communicate with its team in English throughout. Our advice: the person who knows where the records live fills it in, and the person who can bind the company signs.