Privacy Policy

Who we are

Simply Plex ("we") provides field-service software to contracting businesses. If your employer uses Simply Plex, they control your data and we process it on their behalf — ask them first about access or deletion, and we will help them do it.

What we collect

Account information

• Your name, email address and role.
• A hash of your password — a one-way scramble. We never store or see the password itself, and we cannot recover it.
• The time of your most recent signed-in request, at most once an hour. This tells an account owner who is actively using their subscription.

Business information you enter

The work itself: jobs, schedules, customers and their contact details and addresses, invoices and estimates, price lists, parts, equipment, crews, timesheets, notes, checklists, forms, photographs and signatures captured on a job, and imported plan files.

Location, on photos you take

Photographs taken in the app can carry a position. When someone taps As-built photo (geotagged), or photographs a pole on a fiber job, we record where the phone was — and we save it alongside the photo, with the time it was taken and which crew member's device took it.

• Two sources, because one is unreliable. We read the coordinates your phone's camera embedded in the photo, and we also ask the phone for a reading at the moment of capture. The second exists because the first often is not there: Android strips the tag out of photos an app receives, and a camera with location switched off never writes one. If the two disagree by a wide margin — a stale tag from somewhere else — we keep the live reading and record that we did.
• This reading happens only as you take a photo. Never in the background, never while the app is closed. An as-built or pole capture will ask for location permission the first time. An ordinary before/after photo never asks — it uses a position only if you have already granted it for the captures above. (The separate, on the clock position sharing described below is a different thing, asked for separately, and you can decline it and still take geotagged photos.)
• Why we have it: it is the proof that plant was built where the claim says it was built. A contractor submits these photos to the company that hired them in order to get paid, and a coordinate is what makes that photo provable rather than merely asserted. Without it a short-paid invoice is one person's word against another's.
• You can say no, and the app keeps working. The location reading a photo uses is foreground-only — it happens only at the moment of capture, never in the background. (The separate on-the-clock crew sharing described below is the one part of the app that can run in the background, and it is its own opt-in.) Decline location, or have no signal, and the photo still saves; it simply carries no coordinate, and the app says so rather than pretending.
• Who sees it: your employer, and whoever they choose to send their evidence package to — normally the contractor that hired them. We do not send it anywhere on our own.
• How long: it stays part of the job record for as long as the account is active, exactly like the photo it belongs to, because together they are a billing record. It is removed when that record is, under "How long we keep it" below.

Location, while you are on the clock

If you are a crew member, Simply Plex can share your device's position with your employer's dispatch office while you are working, so an office can see where its crews are and route work. This is the one thing in the app that is about you rather than about the work, so here is all of it.

• You are asked first, and background sharing is a second, separate yes. The first time you clock in, the app explains this in a card you have to answer before a single position is sent. Sharing while the app is in the background is an additional, explicit opt-in on top of that — turning on the on-the-clock share does not turn on background sharing; you choose that deliberately, and you can turn either off at any time. Decline and everything else in the app keeps working exactly as before.
• Only while you are clocked in. This runs while the app is open and in the background — for example while you're driving to a site with the app behind your maps app — but only while you are on the clock. Clock out and it stops. Your lunch break, your commute home and your evening are not collected: off the clock, nothing is sent.
• You can see it the whole time it is happening. While it is running in the background, a notification sits in your phone's status bar the entire time, so it can never run unseen. And while the app is open, a bar with a live indicator sits on your jobs list, your job screen and your time clock — and it carries a Stop button. It is not tucked away in a settings screen, and there is no state in which your position is being sent and nothing tells you so.
• How often, and what it contains. About once a minute, and only when you have actually moved (roughly 50 to 75 metres) — plus a keep-alive every few minutes when you are parked, so the office can tell “still on site” from “phone is off”. Each reading is a latitude and longitude, its accuracy, speed and heading, the time, and the job your shift is filed under.
• Stale positions are thrown away rather than sent. If the phone loses signal, readings older than ten minutes are discarded instead of being delivered later. An hour-old position is not useful to a dispatcher and it is not fair to you.
• Who sees it: your employer — on their dispatch map and in the location history on their account. Not your coworkers. Reading the live map needs dispatch access, which is the permission an owner gives the people who schedule and assign work; a crew account does not have it, so one crew member cannot look up another's position. One narrow exception: while a job is marked en route, the customer's tracking link for that job shows the assigned technician's position, and only if it is less than fifteen minutes old. That is the “your technician is on the way” map, and it goes dark the moment the job stops being en route. We do not send your position anywhere on our own.
• How long: the position history is part of your employer's business records and is kept for as long as their account is active — we do not currently expire it automatically. It is removed when their account's data is, under “How long we keep it” below. Signing out of the app clears this phone's copy of your answer, so the next person to sign in on it is asked for themselves.

Photos and videos you attach to a job

The field app lets you take a photo or record a short video clip on a job, or pick one from your library, and attaches it to the work order. Recording a video uses the camera and the microphone — that is the only thing the microphone is for; the app has no separate audio recorder and does not listen in the background. A photo may carry the location described above; a video does not. You can decline the camera, microphone or library and the rest of the app keeps working.

Notifications sent to your phone

If you allow notifications, the field app registers a push token — an address for your handset, issued by your phone's operating system — and we store it against your account so we can reach you. It is an identifier for a device, not for you personally, and we hold nothing else about the phone: no advertising ID, no hardware serial, no contact list.

• What we send. Seven kinds, and this is the whole list: a job being assigned to you; a job being taken off your list; a job of yours being cancelled; an emergency call — an emergency job the shop's answering service took, or one the office created outside business hours — sent to whoever is on call for it or, if nobody is, to the account's owner or owners (or, if the office had already put a crew on it, to that crew); a message from the office on a job you are working; and two about a turn-over — a lead being handed to sales, and a reply in that turn-over's own chat. We do not notify you about status changes you made yourself, or about office edits to a job.
• What is written in one. This matters more than it sounds, because a notification can appear on a locked screen in front of whoever happens to be standing beside you. The job notifications carry the job's own title — sometimes with a line of our own wording around it, as in “do not travel” — so you know which work it is. A job's title is whatever your shop typed when it named the job: on a trade that names jobs by site it can be a street address, and it can be a customer's name, and it will show on a lock screen exactly as typed. A message from the office carries that title and nothing of what was typed; the words stay in the app, one tap away, which is the right place to read them. Three of the seven carry more than a title, and we would rather say so here than have you find out on a lock screen. The emergency call carries the job's title and the site address; when the answering service took the call it also carries the caller's own phone number, because whoever is on call has to be able to ring back without unlocking anything. An emergency the office created carries no phone number. A turn-over hand-off carries a colleague's name and the job's title (“a colleague turned over a lead on…”). And a turn-over chat reply shows the sender's name as its title and, as its text, the first part of what they typed — roughly the first 120 characters.
• When we hold one back. If you are off the clock and it is outside your shop's business hours, a routine job notification is not sent at all — you should not be woken at 9pm about tomorrow's schedule, and that includes a message from the office. Urgent and emergency work, and work starting within the next two hours, still comes through; so does anything sent while you are clocked in. Your employer can switch this hold off in their settings. This hold applies to the first five kinds only. The two turn-over notifications are sent whatever the hour and whether or not you are clocked in; they are not held back by it.
• How often. If the office sends several messages about one job in quick succession, your phone is alerted once rather than once per line; the rest are waiting in the job's thread when you open it. The window is two minutes and it is held in a server's own memory, so on a busy day, across more than one server, a second buzz can still slip through — it errs towards telling you. This applies only to messages from the office. Nothing else is bunched together: every job assignment, removal, cancellation, emergency call, turn-over hand-off and turn-over chat reply is sent as its own notification.
• Who it travels through. Expo's push service, and then Apple or Google, deliver it to your handset. They see the notification's title and text.
• Turning it off. Decline the permission, or switch notifications off for Simply Plex in your phone's settings. Everything else in the app keeps working, and the job still appears in your list. Signing out removes the token from your account, and so does the app being uninstalled — your phone tells us, and we delete the address.

Technical information

• Server logs containing IP address, request path and timing. Used to keep the service running and to investigate faults.
• An audit trail of significant actions — who changed what, and when — which exists so an account owner can answer that question.

Diagnostics when something goes wrong

When the app crashes, or cannot get your work to us, it sends a short report so we can fix it. This is our own software talking to our own servers — not an analytics company, and there is no tracker anywhere in the app.

• What a report contains. The error message and the programming stack trace that goes with it, which screen or part of the app it happened in, and exactly which build you are running. If you are signed in it also carries your account and your company's, so we know whose problem to fix.
• Plus a few numbers about the app's own plumbing. How many photographs are still waiting to upload, how many the app has given up on, how many records the server refused, and how long syncing has been failing. This is how we find out that work is stuck on a phone before somebody loses a day of it.
• What a report can never contain — and this is enforced in the software, not promised. No job titles, notes or checklists. No customer names, addresses or telephone numbers. No footage, prices or invoice amounts. No photographs or signatures. No location. A report may carry only a fixed list of counts and version numbers, and our server throws away anything else before a word of it is written down — there is no field a name or an address can be typed into.
• Only when something is wrong. There is no heartbeat and nothing on a schedule. An app that is working normally sends no diagnostics at all, and the checks ride along with a sync it was doing anyway, so they cost nothing extra on your battery.
• Where it goes, and how long. Into our server logs, alongside the other technical information described above. We use them to fix faults, and for nothing else.

What we do NOT collect

• Where you go when you are off the clock. There is a live crew map, and it is described in full above — it runs while you are clocked in, including in the background while you drive to a site, and it stops the moment you clock out. Off the clock there is no mechanism by which this app knows where you are: nothing is sent off shift, and after you tap Stop or clock out the sharing ends. An address you type onto a job is business data you entered, not tracking.
• Analytics and advertising. No analytics SDK, no advertising network, no third-party tracker, no cross-site profile. We do not sell or share personal information for advertising, and we never have. We do not study how you use the app — nothing records which screens you open, what you tap or how long you spend. The crash diagnostics described above are a different thing: they are ours, they go nowhere else, they carry none of your work, and an app that is working normally sends none.
• Payment card numbers. If card payments are enabled, card details go directly to Stripe and never reach our servers.
• Your contacts or calendar — or anything from your photo library or microphone you did not choose to attach. The app opens the camera, microphone or library picker only when you attach a photo or video to a job, and receives only the item you took or picked — plus, on an as-built capture, the coordinates the camera embedded in it. The microphone is used only while you are recording a video clip; there is no separate audio recording and no background listening.

Why we have it

To provide the service, keep it secure, bill for it, and give account owners the records their business runs on. We do not use your business data to train machine-learning models.

Who else touches it

We use other companies to run the service. They may only process data to provide their service to us.

Twilio, Stripe, the AI provider and the AI receptionist are switched off unless a shop turns them on, and no notification reaches Expo unless you allow notifications on your own phone.

AI document & photo reading is off until an owner switches it on in Settings, and it is off for a new account. While it is off, nothing you upload or forward is sent to an AI provider at all — every screen that offers it says so, and the work can still be done by hand. While it is on, what goes is the document itself: the plan file or work order you opened, or the body text of a work-order email that reached an intake address or a connected mailbox. For a unit pre-check, what goes is that unit's photos (a few at most) and the name and quantity of its pay item — never the customer, the address or any price — and only when someone on your team runs the check, with a daily limit per shop. It is sent to have that document or photo read and returned as fields — not to train a model.

AI estimate drafts use the same switch. When someone on your team taps “Draft estimate with AI” on a job, what goes is that job's title, type, notes, checklist, readings, measurements, parts logged and equipment (make, model, install year, warranty state), whether the customer holds a membership, and the names, units and categories of your price book items — never a price, a cost, the customer's name, address or contact details, or anything about payments. It comes back as suggested price book items and quantities; nothing is saved until a person reviews them and creates the draft, and prices always come from your price book, never from the AI. There is a daily limit per shop, and it is not used to train a model.

The AI receptionist is off until an owner switches it on, and it is off for a new account. While it is on, text messages sent to your shop's receptionist number, and the caller's phone number, are sent to Anthropic so the message can be read, and the conversation is kept in your account so your office can see what was said and booked. The assistant never books, prices or promises anything on its own — it only reads. Messages are not used to train a model.

AI agents you connect

An owner can connect an AI assistant they already use — Claude or ChatGPT, for example — to their Simply Plex account, so it can answer questions about the business, such as what has been built this month or what is still unbilled. This is separate from the AI features above, and it is off until an owner turns it on; it is off for a new account.

• Only the owner can connect one. Turning this on, and connecting an agent, takes the account owner signed in as themselves and re-entering their password. Nobody else in the company can connect an AI assistant to the company's data, and neither can our support staff.
• It acts as one person you choose, with no more access than they have. An agent works on behalf of one named person in your account, and the owner picks what it may read. It can never see more than that person can — if their access is reduced or they are deactivated, the agent's access shrinks or stops with it.
• It reads; it does not act. A connected agent can look things up. It cannot send anything to a customer, take or refund a payment, delete, void or change a record, or change settings or people. The most it can do is propose a draft — a job, a customer, a note or a pay application — and a draft does nothing until a person in your company approves it. Approving a pay application creates a draft invoice; sending it is still a separate step a person takes.
• Customer contact details only if you say so. The phone number, email address and street address fields on your customers and jobs are withheld from an agent unless the owner gave it the separate contact details permission when connecting it. Notes your team typed on a job or customer are passed along as written, so a number or address someone typed into a note can appear in an answer. What each crew member was paid, and payroll, are a separate permission too.
• Every tool call is recorded. Each tool call an agent makes, including one we refuse, is written to your account's audit log — which tool it used, when, for which connection, and whether it was answered or refused — and the owner can review it in Settings, under Audit log. We keep the names of the details it sent and a short fingerprint of them, not what they said, and we do not keep the answer that went back. A request turned away before it reaches a tool — a revoked or unrecognised credential, the feature switched off, or details the tool cannot accept — is not a tool call and is not listed.
• You can cut it off at any time. The owner can disconnect one agent, or all of them, in Settings, and a disconnected agent stops working within seconds. Switching the feature off disconnects every agent at once.
• We do not send anything on our own. Data goes to an agent only as the answer to a request that agent makes with the credential you gave it. We do not send your data to an AI service you have not connected.
• What the AI company does with an answer is between you and them. Once an answer reaches the assistant you connected, that company's own terms and privacy policy govern what it does with it, as they do for anything else you give that assistant. It is a service you chose and connected yourself, not one we use to run Simply Plex, which is why it is not in the table above.

What is stored on your phone

The field app is built to work with no signal, so it keeps a copy of your assigned work on the device and syncs when service returns. Your sign-in tokens are held in the operating system's secure keychain. Signing out erases the local copy, and so does signing in as a different person — a phone that changes hands does not keep the previous account's work.

How long we keep it

• Business records are kept for as long as the account is active, because they are the account's books.
• Deleted records are marked deleted and hidden rather than erased immediately, so a mistake can be undone and so field devices learn to remove their copy.
• Backups are retained on a rolling basis and overwritten in turn, so deleted data can persist in a backup for a short period after removal.
• Close an account and we will delete or return its data within 30 days of being asked.

Security

Traffic is encrypted in transit. Passwords are stored only as bcrypt hashes. Each business's data is separated and every request is scoped to the account it came from. Sign-in tokens are short-lived and deactivating a user ends their sessions. Backups are encrypted, and we test restoring them rather than assuming they work.

No system is perfectly secure. If a breach affects your data we will tell the affected account owners without undue delay.

Your rights

Depending on where you live you may have the right to access, correct, export or delete your personal information, and to object to certain processing. If your employer uses Simply Plex, start with them — the data is theirs to control. Otherwise write to hello@simplyplex.com and we will respond within 30 days.

We do not sell personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising.

Children

Simply Plex is software for businesses and is not directed at anyone under 16. We do not knowingly collect information from children.

Where data lives

Our infrastructure is hosted in the United States. If you use the service from elsewhere, your information is transferred to and processed there.

Changes

If we change what we collect or who we share it with, we will update this page and change the date at the top. Material changes will be emailed to account owners.

Contact

hello@simplyplex.com — questions, requests, or anything on this page that does not match what you see in the product.