Privacy Policy

1. Introduction

Annual Software Ltd. ("we", "us", or "our") is committed to protecting your privacy. This Privacy Policy explains how we collect, use, disclose, and safeguard your information when you use Annual, including our website at annualsoftware.com, the Annual web app and the Annual phone app ("the Service"). By using the Service, you consent to the practices described in this policy.

2. Information We Collect

2.1 Information You Provide

• Account Information: Name, email address, phone number, and company details when you register
• Business Data: Client records, property information, quotes, contracts, scheduled visits, crew assignments, invoices, payments you record, and other operational data you enter
• Early-Access List and Website Messages: When you join the early-access list or send us a message from our website: your name and email address and, if you give them, your company, phone number, how many properties you look after, the work you do and your message. For the early-access list, we also keep that you agreed to receive emails about Annual's launch, and the wording you agreed to.
• Communications: Messages, support tickets, and feedback you send to us
• Payment Information: Billing details processed through our third-party payment provider

2.2 Information Collected Automatically

• Location Data: While a crew member has a visit open at a property, the app records their phone's location: where they check in and check out, and every few seconds to every half-minute in between. In the Annual phone app this continues in the background, with the screen locked, when the phone's location permission allows it; in a web browser it records only while Annual is open on the screen. It stops when the visit is finished. We use it for visit records, proof of service, showing the office where crews are working, and route planning. See section 8.
• Device Information: Browser type, operating system, device type, and screen resolution
• Usage Data: Pages visited, features used, actions taken, timestamps, and session duration. While you are signed in to the app we also keep a usage record: which pages you open (the page's address only, without any search terms or link codes), which steps of signing up you reach, when you open help, a guide, a tour, a video, the in-app assistant or the support chat, when you start a new quote and whether you saved it, when a page shows you an error or a plan limit stops you, and how many minutes each day you were actively using the app (a minute counts only when you click, type or scroll in it). It never includes what you type. We use it to see where people get stuck so we can help them. Only our staff can see it; other people in your company's account cannot.
• Screen Recordings: While you are signed in, we record what happens on your screen in the app, so we can help you and fix problems. See section 9.
• Photos and Media: Visit photos crews add before, during and after the work, for documentation and quality assurance purposes
• Log Data: IP address, access times, and error logs for system monitoring

3. How We Use Your Information

We use the information we collect to:

• Provide, maintain, and improve the Service
• Process your transactions and manage your subscription
• Record crew locations during visits and plan routes for field operations
• Generate reports and analytics for your business
• Send you service-related notifications, updates, and alerts
• Email you about Annual's launch, if you joined the early-access list and agreed to it
• Provide customer support and respond to your inquiries
• Monitor and analyze usage patterns to improve user experience
• Detect, prevent, and address technical issues and security threats
• Comply with legal obligations

4. Data Sharing and Disclosure

We do not sell your personal information. We may share your information in the following circumstances:

• Within Your Organization: Data is shared among users within the same company account based on their assigned roles and permissions
• Service Providers: We use the companies listed in section 4.1 to run the Service. These providers only access data necessary to perform their services
• Quote and Contract Recipients: When you send quotes or contracts for e-signature, the recipient can view the details and the signing page
• Legal Requirements: We may disclose information if required by law, court order, or governmental authority
• Business Transfers: In the event of a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets, your data may be transferred as part of that transaction

4.1 Service Providers

These are the companies that receive information from the Service, and what each one gets:

• Supabase: our database, sign-in and file storage, in Canada. Everything you put into Annual is stored there, including photos, documents and screen recordings.
• Render: hosts the app and its background jobs, in the United States, so everything you send to Annual passes through it.
• SendGrid: sends the Service's emails (the recipient's name and address and the email itself: quotes, contracts, invoices, reports and notifications) and receives the emails sent to a company's inbound address in the Service.
• Twilio: text messages and calls where they are used: phone numbers, the text of each message, and voicemails and their transcripts on a company's phone number in the Service, including texts to our staff about support chat messages.
• Google: maps, address search, weather for your properties, drive times between properties and satellite images of a property (Google Maps Platform), which receive addresses and map locations; push notifications to the phone app (Firebase Cloud Messaging), which receive the notification and the phone it goes to; Google sign-in, if you use it; and Gmail, if your company connects a mailbox to Annual.
• Apple: Sign in with Apple, if you use it, and delivery of push notifications to iPhones.
• Stripe: payments: your Annual subscription, and invoices your clients pay online where your company offers that. Card details are typed into Stripe's secure form, on Stripe's own page or built into the Service, and go straight to Stripe, never to us. Where your company offers it, a client's card is saved with Stripe so invoices can be charged to it automatically.
• Anthropic: the AI features described in section 4.2: replies to our own emails, and, where your company uses them, the emails, texts and voicemail transcripts your company receives, the sent mail of a connected mailbox (to match your writing style), lead tracking (the name, email address, website visits and quote activity of people who gave your company their email), property images, and questions to the in-app assistant.
• OpenAI: turns a crew member's voice note into text when they record one. The recording itself is not kept.
• Cloudflare: the check that you are a person when you join the early-access list, list your company to receive quote requests, send us a message from our website or create a company (Turnstile), which sees your IP address and browser.
• Upstash: limits on how often a request can be made, by IP address and account, and the queue that holds emails and other work until it is done, including recipients' names and addresses.
• Sentry: error monitoring: details of errors in the app, and the replays described in section 9.
• Slack: alerts to our staff about support chat messages and errors, when we route them there.
• Intuit: only if your company connects QuickBooks: the clients (names, contact details, addresses and notes), invoices and payments the Service copies into your QuickBooks, and the Service reads your QuickBooks tax settings.
• ipinfo: an IP address, to say which network it belongs to, in two cases: a visit to a company's own website, only for a company that adds our visitor tracker to it; and the opening of a quote, agreement or signing link sent from Annual (or any other link the Service emails), so that a mail scanner opening the link on its own is not taken for the person it was sent to. For a link, this check stores nothing: the network's name is held in memory for a few hours.
• CARTO and OpenStreetMap: map images: the backup map on crew phones and maps in the app. They see your IP address and the area of the map on screen.
• openrouteservice, Esri ArcGIS and public map-data services: property locations (never a name) when the Service draws the roads between a route's stops for the offline map, or measures a property from map data.

4.2 AI Features

Some features send information to Anthropic's AI models, through Anthropic's commercial API:

• Where your company turns them on: reading the quote requests and emails sent to your company's inbound address in the Service; sorting the texts and voicemail transcripts that reach your company's phone number in the Service, and the emails from people who are not yet your clients in a mailbox a teammate connects to Annual; drafting replies to these for you to review; reading a sample of the sent mail in your company's mailbox, with email addresses, phone numbers and street addresses taken out, so drafted replies match how your company writes; measuring a property from satellite and map images for a quote; and answering the questions you ask the in-app assistant.
• Lead tracking, where your company uses it: for each person who gave your company their email address (on its quote form or by emailing it) or holds a quote from it, their name, email address and property address, the pages they viewed on your company's website and how they found it, how far they got on its quote form, how often they opened your quote emails and viewed the signing page, and when your company last contacted them, so each one can be scored for how ready they are to buy. Visits to your company's website from a business's network are scored too, with the network's name and the pages viewed, and no one named.
• Error reports from the app, so we can work out what went wrong.
• Replies to our own emails: when someone writes back to an email we sent them and our rules cannot tell what the reply means, its subject and first lines (not the email it quotes) are checked, so a request to stop is honoured and the reply is sorted for us to answer.

Under Anthropic's commercial terms, what we send is not used to train its models.

5. Data Security

We implement industry-standard security measures to protect your data, including:

• Encryption in transit (TLS/SSL) and at rest
• Row-Level Security (RLS) policies ensuring data isolation between companies
• Role-based access controls within your organization
• Regular security audits and monitoring
• Secure authentication with session management via HTTP-only cookies

While we strive to protect your data, no method of transmission or storage is 100% secure. We cannot guarantee absolute security.

6. Data Retention

We retain your data for as long as your company's account is active or as needed to provide the Service. We may retain certain data longer as required by law or for legitimate business purposes such as resolving disputes.

• Screen recordings are deleted automatically 90 days after they are made (see section 9).
• Usage records (the pages you opened, the features you used and your active minutes each day, section 2.2) are deleted automatically 13 months after they are made.
• Early-access sign-ups and website messages are kept until you ask us to delete them, which you can do at any time from our support page.
• If your company's account is closed, we keep its data for 30 days so the account can be recovered, after which it may be permanently deleted.
• When you delete your own user account, your sign-in is removed and, straight away, we erase your name, email address, phone number and photo, delete your screen recordings and your usage records, and remove the IP addresses and browsers from your sign-in history. The record of the work you did for your company (visits, routes, location history, time records and the log of what was done in its account) stays with your company, without your name on it. Messages you sent and documents you signed for your company keep the name and address they went out with. If you are the only member of a company you own, deleting your account also closes that company: nobody can sign in to it, its Annual subscription is cancelled, and its data is kept as for any closed company (above).
• To have data deleted sooner, contact us as described in section 7.

7. Your Rights

Depending on your jurisdiction, you may have the following rights:

• Access: Request a copy of the personal data we hold about you
• Correction: Request correction of inaccurate or incomplete data
• Deletion: Request deletion of your personal data
• Data Portability: Request an export of your data in a machine-readable format
• Withdrawal of Consent: Withdraw consent for data processing where consent is the legal basis
• Objection: Object to processing of your personal data in certain circumstances

To exercise any of these rights, please contact us through our support page at annualsoftware.com/support. To see or correct the personal information we hold about you, you can also email our privacy contact at info@annualsoftware.com.

8. Location Data

Annual records the location of crew members' phones while they work a visit, so a company can see where its crews are, prove when and where work was done, and plan routes. Key points about location data:

• When: only while a crew member has a visit open at a property, not just because they are signed in. It stops when the visit is finished.
• How often: where they check in and check out, and every few seconds to every half-minute while the visit is open.
• With the screen off: in the Annual phone app, location keeps being recorded in the background, with the screen locked or another app open, when the phone's location permission is set to allow it ("Always" on iPhone). In a web browser it is recorded only while Annual is open on the screen.
• What the crew member sees: the phone shows its own location indicator while the app is using location.
• Who can see it: people in the company whose role allows it can see where crews are while they work, and the location history afterwards.
• How long it is kept: location history is kept with the company's visits as its record of the work. It is not deleted on a schedule. When a person deletes their account, their location history stays with the company without their name on it.

9. Screen Recordings in the App

While you are signed in to Annual, on the web or in the phone app, we record what happens on your screen. Key points about screen recordings:

• What is recorded: the pages you open and what they show, where you click and scroll, and what you type. Pages you visit while signed out are not recorded this way.
• What is hidden: password fields are masked, so what you type into them is never recorded, and so is any part of the app we mark as private. Card numbers are entered in our payment provider's own secure form, which is never part of a recording.
• Why: to help you when you ask for support, and to find and fix problems in the Service. Recordings are never used for advertising and never sold.
• Who can watch them: our staff only, and only to help you or to fix problems in the Service. Other people in your company's account cannot. Recordings are stored with our database provider, Supabase.
• How long we keep them: 90 days. Recordings are then deleted automatically. The record that you signed in (when, from which device and browser, and the IP address) stays in your account's sign-in history.
• Deleting them sooner: send us a request from our support page at annualsoftware.com/support, using the email address you sign in with, and we will delete your recordings. Deleting your account also deletes them.

Separately, our error-monitoring provider, Sentry, keeps a replay of some visits to our website and app, signed in or not, and of any visit where something goes wrong. These replays hide all text, everything you type and all images. They show the layout of each page, the page addresses and where you clicked, along with technical details of the app's network requests, console messages and errors. Sentry keeps them for up to 90 days.

10. Cookies and Tracking

Essential cookies. We use cookies for sign-in and session management. The Service cannot work without them.

How you found us. On your first visit to our website, your browser keeps a note of the page you landed on, the website that sent you and any campaign tags in the link (for example "utm_source"). If you create a company, that note is saved with it so we know which of our marketing works. It never holds anything you type.

No analytics or advertising tags. Our website at annualsoftware.com does not use Google Analytics, advertising tags or tracking pixels, and neither does the app.

We do not use any advertising cookies or tracking pixels, and we do not sell your personal information.

11. Children's Privacy

The Service is not intended for use by individuals under the age of 16. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children. If we become aware that we have collected data from a child, we will take steps to delete that information promptly.

12. International Data Transfers

Your data may be processed and stored in servers located in Canada and the United States. Our database is in Canada; our hosting and most of the providers in section 4.1 are in the United States. By using the Service, you consent to the transfer of your data to these jurisdictions, which may have different data protection laws than your country of residence.

13. Changes to This Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. We will notify you of material changes by posting the updated policy on the Service and updating the "Last updated" date. We encourage you to review this policy periodically.

14. Contact Us

If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy or our data practices, or want to see or correct the personal information we hold about you, please contact us: