Privacy Policy

Information we collect

When your employer's admin creates or invites your account, or when you set one up yourself, Shiftova collects:

• Account details — your full name and email address, and, if your employer adds them, your hire date and birth date (used for labour rules that depend on age or length of service).
• Company and role — which company account you belong to, and whether you're set up as an employee, a manager, or an admin. A shared clock-in tablet (kiosk) has its own account, and each person's kiosk PIN is stored only in scrambled (hashed) form.
• Schedules and requests — your shifts and positions, shift swaps, time-off requests, and availability.
• Time and attendance records — the timestamp of every clock-in, clock-out and break, and the payroll-period totals calculated from them (regular hours, overtime, and statutory holiday hours).
• Adjustment history — if an admin or manager corrects one of your time entries, we record what changed, who changed it, and when, so the change is visible to you.
• Location at clock-in/out — see the next section.
• Pay information — the hourly wage or salary your employer enters, used to estimate labour costs and payroll totals.
• Pooled tips — if your employer pools tips, your share for each day, worked out from your hours and position.
• Onboarding documents — photos of onboarding paperwork that an admin adds to your profile.
• Workplace incident reports — if you file a report or are named in one: what happened, when and where, any injury and the part of the body affected, whether medical attention was sought, time lost from work, witnesses, and any photos.
• Messages — see Team chat and direct messages.
• Device token for notifications — a token from your phone that lets us send you notifications, such as shift reminders and new messages.
• Crash reports — if the app crashes or hits an error: what went wrong and where in the app, your device model and operating system, and the app version. Reports don't include your name, email, or what's in your schedules or messages.

If you turn on calendar sync, Shiftova adds your published shifts to a Shiftova calendar on your own device. It doesn't read your other calendar events, and nothing from your calendar is sent to us.

How location is used

Shiftova records a single GPS coordinate at the moment you tap Clock in and again when you tap Clock out. That's it — the app does not track your location in the background, between those two moments, or at any other time.

Your device also converts each of those coordinates into a nearby street address, so the record is readable at a glance. The address is worked out from the coordinate alone — no additional location is collected to produce it. Once saved, neither the coordinate nor the address can be altered by anyone, including an admin.

Admins at your company can see both — they appear against each clock-in and clock-out on the payroll report your employer generates for a pay period. This is so an employer can verify attendance. They are not shown to anyone outside your company.

Team chat and direct messages

Shiftova includes a company-wide team chat, group chats, and 1:1 direct messages between coworkers. Admins at your company can read every message in your company, including your direct messages with other people— the same way they can already see time entries and location data, for running the business and handling workplace concerns. Managers can read team-wide and group chats, but not other people's direct messages. The people in a conversation can see when you've read their messages (read receipts). Messages are not shared with anyone outside your company.

Messages are automatically and permanently deleted 365 days after they're sent. You can delete your own messages at any time (an admin can still see what you wrote, for the same reason described above), report a message to your company's admins, or block another person from messaging you directly.

Sales data and Square

Admins can enter their business's daily sales, and optionally sales by hour, so Shiftova can forecast how busy each day will be and show labour costs as a percentage of sales. These are totals for the business, not information about you.

An admin can instead connect the business's Square account. Shiftova then has read-only access to the business's Square orders and its business profile, and uses them to fill in sales totals by day and by hour, and card tips by day. We keep those totals, not individual orders or customer details. The connection is stored encrypted, the admin can disconnect it at any time in Settings, and we never send information about you to Square.

An admin can also email us the business's past daily sales, such as a spreadsheet or a sales report from its point-of-sale system, and have us load them into Shiftova as a paid add-on. We use the file only to enter those daily sales totals into that business's account. If the file also contains individual orders, customer details or staff names, we leave those out. Once the totals are loaded, we delete the file and the email it came with. The loaded totals are then kept like any other sales totals (see Data retention and deletion).

How we use your information

We use the information above only to run the core functions of the app:

• Building and sharing schedules, and handling shift swaps and time-off requests.
• Recording your worked hours and computing payroll-period totals, including overtime and stat-holiday hours.
• Letting your company's admins and managers review, and where necessary correct, the team's attendance.
• Estimating labour costs, splitting pooled tips, and forecasting sales from your company's own history. These are simple calculations over your company's own data; no outside data is added.
• Sending notifications, such as shift reminders, schedule changes and new messages.
• Authenticating you and keeping your account secure.
• Sending account-related email — invites, password resets, and confirmations — and emailing incident reports to your company's admins.

We do not use your information for advertising, and we do not sell it to anyone.

Who can see your information

• You can always see your own time entries, edit history, pooled tips, and account details.
• Your coworkers can see your name and your published shifts on the team schedule, and the messages you send them.
• Managers at your company can see names, schedules, time-off requests, time entries (including clock-in and clock-out location), and incident reports, so they can run shifts and approve requests. They cannot see pay, pooled tips, onboarding documents, or other people's direct messages.
• Admins at your company can see everything above for everyone at that same company, plus pay, pooled tips, onboarding documents, and every chat message and direct message sent within the company (see Team chat and direct messages) — this is how they run payroll, cover shifts, and handle workplace concerns. They cannot see data belonging to any other company using Shiftova.
• Nobody outside your company — including other companies using Shiftova — can see your information, apart from the service providers below that run parts of Shiftova for us. Company data is kept strictly separate at the database level, not just hidden in the app.

Service providers

These companies run parts of Shiftova for us. Each one handles data only to provide its service to Shiftova, under its own privacy and security commitments. None of them may use it for advertising.

• Supabase — stores all app data and files, handles sign-in, sends account emails, and runs our server functions.
• Expo, Apple Push Notification service and Google Firebase Cloud Messaging — deliver notifications to your device. They receive your device token and the notification's text. Expo also delivers app updates: when the app checks for one, it sends Expo the app version, your device's platform and a random install ID.
• Sentry — receives the crash reports described above, so we can find and fix problems.
• Resend — delivers incident report emails to your company's admins.
• Square — only if your employer connects it (see Sales data and Square).
• Stripe — handles your employer's subscription payments on our website. Shiftova never sees full card numbers.
• Vercel — hosts shiftova.ca and counts anonymous page views, without cookies. On the sign-up form it also counts which fields were reached, which plan was picked and any error shown — never anything typed into the form.

We don't use advertising or analytics tools in the app — crash reports are the only diagnostic data it sends — and we don't sell or rent your information.

How your information is stored

Shiftova's data is stored with Supabase, a hosted Postgres database provider. Access to every table is enforced by row-level security policies at the database layer — meaning even a bug in the app's own code can't leak one company's data to another, because the database itself refuses the query. Passwords are never stored in plain text, photos are kept in private storage that only authorized people at your company can open, and a connected Square account's access is stored encrypted.

Your choices

• Location — you can deny location access; clocking in still works (see How location is used).
• Notifications — you can turn shift reminders and overtime alerts on or off in the app, and turn off notifications in your phone's settings.
• Calendar sync — off unless you turn it on, and you can turn it off at any time.
• Your data — you can download a copy of your own records in the app under Account > Download my data.

Data retention and deletion

We keep your account and time-tracking data for as long as your account is active with your company. To request access to, correction of, or deletion of your data, contact your company's admin or reach out to us directly (see Contact us).

Note that payroll and attendance records may need to be retained for a period after a deletion request to meet your employer's legal recordkeeping obligations, even if your account itself is removed.

Chat messages and direct messages are the one exception to "as long as your account is active" — they are automatically and permanently deleted 365 days after being sent, regardless of account status.

Business sales totals and daily tip records are kept for up to seven years, in line with business recordkeeping rules, and then deleted automatically.

Children's privacy

Shiftova is a workplace tool and is not directed at, or knowingly used by, children. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone under the minimum working age in their jurisdiction.

Changes to this policy

If we make material changes to this policy, we'll update the date at the top of this page. We encourage you to check back periodically.

Contact us

Questions about this policy or your data? Reach us at hello@shiftova.ca.