Before you put payroll, customer names and job photos into anyone’s software, you should ask these ten questions. Here are our answers, in plain English, with nothing left vague.
Your time cards, job tickets, quotes, fuel logs, pre-task plans, photos and signatures live in one Postgres database in Ohio, USA (Amazon’s us-east-2 region, run by Supabase). The app itself is static files served by Netlify’s content network. Truck GPS positions and the map tiles behind the fleet screen sit on a small server in San Francisco (DigitalOcean) that never holds payroll or customer data.
Punches and photos taken with no signal wait on the operator’s phone until it reconnects, then go up. Nothing is lost in a basement or a parking garage.
All three are established US companies with their own published security programs. We do not run servers in a closet.
In transit: yes. Every connection between a phone, the office, the app and the database is HTTPS. The one exception is the link from a truck tracker to the tracking server: it rides inside the cellular carrier’s encrypted radio network but is not separately encrypted end-to-end, and it carries only a tracker serial, position, speed and ignition state — never a name, a job or a dollar figure. Only trackers whose serials we have registered are accepted; unknown devices are ignored. Adding end-to-end encryption on this link is on our hardening list.
At rest: yes for the database, which is encrypted on disk by the hosting provider, and for our nightly off-site backup copies, which are encrypted with a key that only the owner holds. That key is kept in two places the owner controls (a password manager and on paper). If both were somehow lost, the off-site copies would be unreadable — by design — but the database provider’s own daily backups do not depend on that key, so recovery would still be possible. On phones, data is protected by the phone’s own lock and encryption.
You get it all back, and then we delete it. If Saw Time ever closes, every customer gets at least 90 days’ notice, the Download everything button keeps working through that period, and at the end we delete the company’s database and confirm it in writing. Your paper file cabinet never depended on us; neither does your digital one.
About a minute, any time, no request needed. The office hub has a Download everything button. It builds one zip file on your own computer with every time card, edit, approval, signature, job ticket, price, quote, fuel fill and truck the company has ever entered, as CSV files that open in Excel, plus every photo, signature and voice note as ordinary files. Truck GPS comes out at whatever detail we still hold — full points for about the last 90 days, trip summaries for everything older, the same as the retention described in the privacy notice. Nothing is held back and nothing is charged.
Yes. The database provider takes a full backup every day, kept for seven days, in Ohio. On top of that, our own nightly copy is encrypted and stored on a server in San Francisco — a different company in a different part of the country. A problem at one provider does not take out both copies.
There are three parts, and we rehearse the hard one.
The truck-tracking server is deliberately disposable. If it dies, the map goes dark until it restarts. No payroll or customer record ever lived there.
Saw Time is a small company, and we will not pretend otherwise. The owner has administrative access to the database to run the service and to help you when something is wrong. No one else does. That access goes through the database provider’s own console, which keeps its own logs of who signed in and when — a record we could not quietly erase. There is no support team browsing your jobs.
Inside your company, access is enforced by the database, not by the screen: an operator’s login can read only his own time card, and your office accounts see your company and nothing else. Every edit to a time card is written to an audit trail with who, when, the old value and the new value, and rows are never deleted — only corrected in the open.
Yes. This page is the security summary; the Privacy Policy says exactly what we collect and why, and the Terms of Service say who owns what. All three are written to be read by a contractor, not a lawyer, and they mean what they say.
You do. All of it. Every record, photo, signature, customer name and price you put into Saw Time belongs to your company. We hold a license to store and process it for one purpose: running the service for you. We do not mine it, sell it, share it with other subscribers, or use it to compete with you. That is in the terms, in those words.
Effective September 3, 2026. If any of this changes, this page changes with it.
Ask them straight. A real person answers, and anything we build for you gets its own database, its own backups and an export you can take any day.