Who this policy is for
Worksted is business software for Australian trade businesses. It is operated by legal entity name, ABN ABN, of business address(“we”, “us”).
There are two different relationships in play, and they carry different responsibilities.
- Your business and your team. When you sign up, we hold personal information about you and the people you invite — names, email addresses, phone numbers, roles. We decide how that information is handled, and this policy governs it.
- Your customers and your jobs. Everything you put into Worksted about the people you work for — their names, addresses, site access notes, job photos, the quotes and invoices you send them — belongs to you. We hold and process it on your instructions so the software works. You remain responsible for how you collect that information and what you tell your own customers about it.
We handle personal information in accordance with the Australian Privacy Principles set out in the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth).
What we collect
From you and your team
- Name, email address, phone number and password (stored hashed, never in readable form).
- Your profile photo, if you upload one.
- Your role in the business and the permissions attached to it.
- Your business details — trading name, ABN, GST registration, business address, and the BSB and account number you want printed on your invoices.
- Labour cost rates, timesheets, leave records and approvals, where you use those features.
- Compliance evidence you upload for your team — licences, tickets, inductions and similar documents, along with issue and expiry dates. Some of these can be marked sensitive, which restricts who inside your business can open them.
We do not ask for tax file numbers, dates of birth, superannuation details or bank details for individual staff, and there are no fields for them. Anything you choose to upload into a document or a custom form is up to you — please do not put information in there that you would not want us holding.
About your customers and your work
- Client and contact records — names, phone numbers, email addresses and notes.
- Site addresses, access notes, and the coordinates we derive from an address so it can be shown on a map.
- Jobs, scheduling, time entries, quotes, invoices, variations, purchase orders and payments you record.
- Photos and documents you attach to a job or a site, including supplier receipts.
- Signatures captured on an approval.
Automatically, as you use the service
- Sign-in records, including your IP address, browser or device details, and the devices you have signed in from — we use these to keep your account secure and to tell you when a new device signs in.
- A log of the emails and notifications we send on your behalf, so there is a record of what went out and whether it was delivered.
- An audit trail of significant actions taken inside your business — who changed what, and when.
- Application error and performance data, where error monitoring is switched on for the environment you are using.
Why we use it
- To run the service — showing you your jobs, producing your quotes and invoices, and keeping your records where you left them.
- To send email on your behalf to the people you choose, such as a quote or an invoice.
- To send you notifications about your own work — an approval waiting on you, an invoice falling overdue.
- To take payment for your subscription.
- To keep accounts secure — verifying your email and phone, detecting unusual sign-ins, and maintaining the audit trail.
- To support you when you ask for help, and to fix faults.
- To meet our legal obligations.
We do not sell personal information, we do not share it with advertisers, and we do not use your business's data to build products for anyone else.
Where your data is stored
The application and its database run in Sydney, Australia. Your records — clients, jobs, quotes, invoices, timesheets — are held in a Postgres database hosted in the Sydney region.
Files — job photos, documents, receipts and the PDFs we generate — are held in S3-compatible object storage located in object storage region. That storage is private. When you or someone you have shared a file with needs to open one, we hand out a signed link that stops working after 15 minutes. Files uploaded but never attached to anything are deleted automatically within 24 hours.
The one exception is your business logo, which is stored in a public bucket so it can be shown on the quotes and invoices you send. Anything you upload as a logo should be treated as public.
Data is encrypted in transit. Some of the providers listed below operate outside Australia, which is covered in the overseas disclosure section.
AI features — receipts and document import
- Receipt scanning. When you photograph a supplier receipt, the image or PDF is sent to OpenAI, which reads the supplier, date, amounts and GST back to us so the cost can be attached to the job. This feature is off unless your business turns it on. With it off, no receipt ever leaves our infrastructure.
- Document template import. When you import an existing PDF form to turn it into a Worksted template, the PDF is sent to OpenAI, which reads its structure back to us.
What is sent is the file and a fixed set of instructions telling the model what to look for. We do not send your client records, your job records, your account details, or anything identifying your business alongside it.
We use OpenAI’s API rather than a consumer product. OpenAI states that data submitted through its API is not used to train its models and is retained only briefly for abuse monitoring; their terms, not ours, govern that. The information read out of the file is stored back in Worksted as part of your records.
Extraction is a reading aid, not a bookkeeper. Check what it produces before you rely on it — see the terms of service.
What the mobile app accesses on your phone
The field app asks for a small number of permissions. Each one is optional, each is requested at the moment it is needed, and declining one only disables that feature.
- Camera and photo library — to photograph work on site and attach photos to a job.
- Microphone and speech recognition— to dictate job notes instead of typing them. Speech is converted to text by your phone’s own operating system.
- Contacts— to add a client from your phone’s address book without retyping it. We read only the contact you pick, and only when you pick it.
- Notifications — to alert you about your work.
Accounting integrations
If an administrator in your business connects Xero, we send data to Xero on your behalf: your clients and suppliers as contacts (name, email, phone, address, and a supplier ABN where you hold one), and your invoices, bills and payments. You can also choose to import your existing Xero customers and items in the other direction.
The connection is off until someone with the right permission sets it up, and disconnecting it stops any further data being sent. What Xero does with the data once it is there is governed by your relationship with Xero.
You can also choose to sign in using a Xero account. If you do, we store the identifier Xero gives us and the email address on that account, so we can recognise you next time.
How long we keep it
- Your business records are kept for as long as your account is open. Cancelling a subscription does not delete anything — access stops, the records stay, and resubscribing restores them.
- The audit trail is kept for 12 months by default. An administrator can set this anywhere between 30 days and 10 years in your business settings.
- Records of accounting sync activity are kept for 90 days.
- Files uploaded but never attached to anything are deleted within 24 hours.
- Our own operational logs of platform activity are kept for two years.
There is no self-service “delete everything” button today. If you want your data deleted, write to support@worksted.co and we will action it manually within deletion turnaround, e.g. 30 days. We may need to keep some records after that where the law requires it, such as records relating to payments we have taken.
Sending information overseas
The application and its database are in Australia. Some of the providers listed above process data outside Australia — including Stripe, OpenAI, Google, Expo, Cloudflare, Vercel and our email provider. Where that happens, we take reasonable steps to satisfy ourselves that the provider handles personal information consistently with the Australian Privacy Principles, but we cannot control their handling directly, and the laws of the country they operate in may apply.
How we protect it
- Every business is separated from every other in the database, and every query is scoped to the business it belongs to.
- What each person can see and do is controlled by their role, down to individual records.
- Passwords are hashed. We cannot read yours.
- Files are private by default and are only ever served through short-lived signed links.
- Card details are handled by Stripe and never reach our servers.
- Significant actions are recorded in an audit trail that cannot be edited.
No system is perfectly secure. If a data breach occurs that is likely to cause serious harm, we will tell the businesses affected, and notify the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner where the Notifiable Data Breaches scheme applies.
Your rights
You can ask us for a copy of the personal information we hold about you, ask us to correct it if it is wrong, or ask us to delete it. Write to support@worksted.co and we will respond within response window, e.g. 30 days.
Most of it you can see and change yourself: your own profile in your account settings, and your business records throughout the app.
If you are unhappy with how we have handled your personal information or a request, tell us first and we will try to sort it out. If you are still unhappy, you can complain to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner.
Children
Worksted is for businesses, and accounts are for adults. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 16. If you believe we have, tell us and we will remove it.
Changes to this policy
We will update this policy as the product changes. The version number and effective date at the top of this page tell you which version you are reading. If a change materially affects how we handle your information, we will tell account owners by email before it takes effect.
Contact us
Privacy questions, access requests and complaints: support@worksted.co, our contact page, or business address.