It is one of the most common calls we take. A FileMaker system runs a significant part of the business, the person who built it is no longer available, and nobody currently in the company fully understands it.
This is recoverable. It is also more common than you would think, at companies far larger than yours.
Step 1: Establish control
Before anything technical, confirm you actually control the assets:
- Full access credentials, including a genuine Full Access account.
- The Claris licence, in your company's name, with a known renewal date.
- Access to wherever the system is hosted.
- A backup you have personally restored and opened, not merely a backup that exists.
That last point matters most. Untested backups fail exactly when you need them.
Step 2: Audit
A structured review of the schema, scripts, layouts, security model, integrations and hosting. The output should be a written document that tells you what the system does, what shape it is in, what is dangerous and what is simply untidy.
Step 3: Stabilise
Fix the risks first: unsupported versions, missing backups, shared logins, an account nobody can disable, a server that has not been patched. This is unglamorous and it is the work that stops a bad week becoming a catastrophic one.
Step 4: Document
Enough written material that a competent developer could take over without archaeology. This is the single best protection against being in the same position again.
Step 5: Decide the direction
Only now is it sensible to ask whether to extend, modernise or replace. Very often the answer is extend — the system encodes years of hard-won business logic, and rewriting that from scratch is both expensive and risky.
What we do
We take on inherited FileMaker systems across the UK, including ones we did not build and ones that have not been touched in a decade. No judgement about the state of it. We have seen worse.