Are old completed questionnaires kept or deleted

What is retained and what disappears

Completed questionnaires themselves do not disappear automatically: the chain file from which the answers come remains in existence and is reused with the next questionnaire. What changes from round to round is not the underlying answer but the question: one customer asks for "ISO 27001-certified, yes/no", another asks for "which of the Annex A measures are implemented". Both questions draw from the same answer about ISO 9001 certification or similar records, not from a newly completed copy per portal.

This means that a previously confirmed answer — for example about the ten measures of Article 21(2) of the NIS2 Directive, or about the VSME baseline module for sustainability — comes back next time as a proposal, with a request to confirm again. Nothing is carried forward automatically without that confirmation. If an underlying fact changes, such as the number of employees or a newly concluded insurance policy, then that feeds through to all future questionnaires that ask for that fact — not retroactively to what has already been submitted to a customer.

Why this follows from the structure of the chain file

This does not follow from a statutory retention obligation that specifically concerns these questionnaires, but from the system's operation itself: one chain file feeds multiple portals, and an answer that has once been recorded and confirmed is the source for the next questionnaire until the entrepreneur adjusts it themselves. For data that itself has a statutory basis — such as the statutory name and registration number from the Trade Register Act 2007 — the source lies outside the file and is updated in the file when changed in the trade register. What has previously been submitted to a customer falls under that customer's portal and retention period; this platform neither records anything about it nor has access to it.