Data Retention Policy

Retention policies are usually written aspirationally. This one describes what the software actually does. The short version: VERA keeps your data for as long as your account exists and does very little automatic deletion, because a business tool that quietly deletes last year's invoices is a worse product. Deleting your account is what removes your data, and that deletion is immediate and thorough.

Version: 1.1
Effective: August 12, 2026
Last updated: August 12, 2026
Revisions: 2

On this page (5 sections)

1. Principles
2. Retention by category
3. What VERA does not delete automatically
4. Backups
5. Data you hold as a controller

1. Principles

Data is retained for as long as it is needed for the purpose it was collected for, plus any period the law requires. For an operational business tool, that period is normally the life of the account: your estimates, invoices, customer records, and audit history are records you need to be able to look back at.

Deletion in VERA means removal from the live database. It is not a soft-delete flag, and there is no recycle bin from which an account can be restored.

2. Retention by category

The table below states the actual behavior of the system today.

Data	Retention	How it ends
Account, business profile, brand kit	Life of the account	Deleted when you delete your account
Customer and operational records (leads, contacts, companies, deals, jobs, appointments, technicians, support tickets)	Life of the account	Delete individual records in the app, or all of them by deleting the account
Estimates, invoices, imported documents and their original file copies	Life of the account	Delete individually in the app, or by deleting the account
Uploaded photographs, logos, and generated images	Life of the account	Delete in the app, or by deleting the account
Content drafts, proposals, and generated content	Life of the account	Delete in the app, or by deleting the account
Audit trail and security events	Life of the account. Append-only; never edited or deleted in ordinary operation	Removed with the account
Raw location readings from mileage recording	30 days by default. The account holder can shorten or extend this, or set it to zero so readings are never stored	Pruned automatically by a scheduled sweep. The trip they measured survives; the breadcrumbs behind it do not
Mileage trips, vehicles, and reimbursement records	Life of the account. A trip that has been submitted is voided rather than deleted, so the money trail survives. Voided trips are pruned after the account's trip retention window, which cannot be set below one year. Approved and reimbursed trips are never automatically removed	Delete an unsubmitted draft in the app, or remove everything by deleting the account
Geocoding and routing cache	30 days for addresses, 7 days for routes	Expires automatically. Keyed by a hash of the normalized request and holds no account identifier, so it is not swept by account deletion and cannot be traced back to a person
Text message conversations, MMS media, and consent records	Life of the account	Deleted with the account, consent and opt-out records included. Export before deleting if you need the record for your own compliance file
Social posts, their media, and the publishing queue	Life of the account	Deleted with the account, which also stops anything still queued from being published. Content already published to a platform stays on that platform under its own retention
Receipts, mileage proof images, and other uploaded files	Life of the record they belong to	Deleted when you delete the record, and with the account
Voice conversations	The transcript is kept with its conversation for the life of the account. No audio recording is created or kept at any point	Deleted with the conversation, or with the account
Industry Radar news articles	30 days	Pruned automatically on each scan
Connector credentials (OAuth tokens, API keys)	Until you disconnect the integration	Removed on disconnect, and on account deletion
Session tokens	Until expiry, sign-out, or revocation	Revoked immediately by password reset, sign out of all devices, or suspension
Email verification and password reset tokens	24 hours and 1 hour respectively, single use	Expire or are consumed; cleared on account deletion
OAuth flow state cookies	10 minutes	Expire in the browser
Rate-limit counters	One fixed window per key, overwritten when the window resets	Overwritten in place. Rows may persist keyed to an email address or IP address until the next attempt from that key
Webhook delivery ids (replay protection)	Retained as a small provider and event-id record	Not user-scoped; not removed by account deletion
Platform admin audit log	Retained after the affected account is removed, by design	Kept as an operator accountability record
Stripe billing records	Held by Stripe under its own retention and financial record obligations	Governed by Stripe, not by VERA
Server and error logs	Retained by the hosting provider under its default log retention	Rotated by the provider

3. What VERA does not delete automatically

Scheduled deletion is deliberately narrow. It runs against raw location readings, voided mileage trips past their window, the routing cache, Industry Radar articles, and the short-lived tokens above. Everything else stays until you remove it: a business tool that quietly deletes last year's invoices is a worse product. If you want something gone, delete it in the app or delete the account.

Where a retention period is configurable, it is configurable by the account holder rather than by us, and the setting applies going forward. Changing it does not restore data a previous setting already removed.

Some plan descriptions refer to a task history window of 30 days, 6 months, or 12 months by tier. Treat those as descriptions of the history the interface is designed to surface, not as a deletion schedule; VERA does not currently purge history when a window elapses.

4. Backups

VERA does not operate its own backup tooling. Durability and point-in-time recovery depend on the managed database provider hosting the deployment, under that provider's capabilities and retention.

This means we cannot promise that deleted data is purged from every provider-held backup snapshot immediately. It is removed from the live database at once and would age out of provider snapshots on the provider's cycle. We also cannot restore an account you deleted, even from a backup.

5. Data you hold as a controller

For personal data about your own customers, you decide the retention period; VERA retains it for as long as you keep it in the account. If your own retention policy is shorter than the life of your VERA account, delete those records in the app when their period ends. VERA does not enforce a retention schedule on your behalf.

Change history

Every revision of this document, newest first. Material changes are notified to account holders before they take effect where practicable.

v1.1August 12, 2026
Added retention rows for raw location readings, mileage trips and vehicles, the geocoding cache, messaging and consent records, social posts and their queue, uploaded receipts and proof images, and voice transcripts. Corrected the claim that Industry Radar was the only scheduled prune.
v1.0July 28, 2026
Initial Data Retention Policy published.

Questions about this document?

Legal and contracts: support@myvera.io. Privacy and data rights: support@myvera.io. Security reports: support@myvera.io.

This document is a carefully drafted policy written against how VERA actually works. It is not legal advice, and it should be reviewed by a licensed attorney in your jurisdiction before you rely on it.