Your data.

Your book is yours

Everything you put into SkipDeck — customers, sites, jobs, invoices, waste records, photographs and documents — belongs to your firm. We do not sell it, share it or use it to train anything.

We use it only to run SkipDeck for you and to help when you ask. Clauses 4 and 12 of our terms say this as part of the contract.

Where it is kept

Each firm has its own database and its own copy of the application, on its own private network on the server. Your records are not rows in a table shared with other firms.

The server is with Hetzner, in Helsinki, Finland, inside the EU.

Who can see it

Inside your firm, each person has their own sign-in and one of four roles: owner, dispatcher, office or viewer. The owner decides who has which. Only an owner can change settings, manage accounts or export the whole book.

At SkipDeck, Michael Doherty looks after the server. He opens a firm's book only to keep the service running or when that firm asks for help.

How it is backed up

• Every six hours a copy of your book is taken on the server, checked that it opens, and kept. The last thirty copies are kept.
• Every day Hetzner takes a snapshot of the whole server. The last seven are kept.
• Every night your newest copy is also sent to two places away from the server: a Hetzner Storage Box in the EU, and SkipDeck's own backup computer in the UK. The backup computer opens and checks every copy it receives. Nightly copies are kept for 35 days, then one a month for two years. The Storage Box also keeps weekly snapshots for about ten weeks.

Restoring a firm's book from a backup was tested on 5 September 2026 and took about 90 seconds. Rebuilding the whole server from a snapshot was tested the same day.

How it is protected

• Every connection to SkipDeck is encrypted (HTTPS).
• Passwords are stored as scrypt hashes, never as the password itself.
• After five wrong passwords for one account within 15 minutes, that account's sign-in is refused until the 15 minutes have passed.
• The owner can see every sign-in and every look at a person's information, in Settings › Data protection.
• The server accepts administrator sign-in by key only, never by password, and installs security updates automatically.

If personal data in your book is lost or exposed, we will tell you without undue delay, with what we know, so you can meet your own 72-hour duty to the ICO.

Taking a full copy

An owner can download the whole book at any time from Settings › Data protection › Export everything. You do not need to ask us, and you do not need to be leaving.

The download is one zip file holding:

• every table as a CSV file, which opens in Excel
• the same tables as a single database file, for importing into other software
• every photograph, signature and document
• a list of everything in the file, with a checksum for each part

Passwords, sign-in keys and access tokens are left out, and the file says which. Each export is listed in Settings with its date, who made it and the checksum of the file.

When you leave

• You export everything first. Nothing else begins until that export has completed.
• Your book goes offline and stays recoverable for 14 days in case you change your mind.
• On day 15 it is destroyed: the database, its backups and its files.
• By day 22 the nightly off-site copies and the server snapshots containing it are gone too. After that no copy of your book exists in our systems.
• We write to you confirming it is done, within 5 working days of the destruction.

If you stop paying without asking us to close the account, we keep your book offline and recoverable for 90 days, and write to you before starting that process.

Some records have legal retention periods of their own: waste transfer notes, hazardous waste consignment notes and the accounting records behind your invoices. Clause 8 of our terms says how those are handled.

Who else handles it

• Hetzner Online GmbH — the server and its backups, in Finland, and the Storage Box, in the EU.
• OpenStreetMap Foundation (Nominatim) — receives a site address once, to turn it into map coordinates.
• Overpass API — receives map areas, to look up road and site data. No personal data.
• Xero — only if you connect your own Xero account, and only the invoice data you choose to send.

Route planning runs on our own servers. No address or coordinate is sent to a commercial routing provider.

Questions

Email hello@skipdeck.co.uk. We are registered with the Information Commissioner's Office under registration ZC244421.