Where your data lives, and who can see it.

The application and its database run on a server at OVHcloud’s data centre in Beauharnois, Quebec, outside Montreal.

Uploaded files are stored by Google Cloud Storage, through Firebase, in the United States, encrypted at rest. That covers jobsite photos, documents, signed proposals and change order PDFs, and company logos.

A few other providers handle specific jobs, each listed with where it holds data on the sub-processors page:

• Google Firebase Authentication, for signing in (United States)
• Stripe, for your subscription and for payments your clients make
• Resend, for sending email (United States)

Your team signs in with an email and password handled by Google Firebase Authentication. Ridgepole never stores your password.

Clients and sub-trades do not get passwords. They sign in to their own portals with a link emailed to them. A client’s link works once and expires after an hour. Asking for a link never reveals whether an email address is on file.

Archiving a job closes its client portal straight away, including for a client who is already signed in.

Every record in Ridgepole carries your company’s identifier, and the check happens in one place, on every request, before any feature code runs. That way a mistake inside one feature is not enough to show another company’s records.

Automated tests that try to reach another company’s records run on every change before it ships.

There are six roles: owner, admin, project manager, field user, subcontractor and client. Each one sees what its job needs.

• Field users see the work, not the money: no contract value, budget, spending or margin.
• Clients never see your cost, markup or margin, in the portal or on any PDF.
• Your business licence and WCB account numbers, and your billing and financing settings, are visible to owners and admins only.
• Clients and sub-trades use separate portals, not the app your office uses.

Every connection to Ridgepole is encrypted with TLS: the app, both portals and the API. Certificates are issued and renewed automatically, and browsers are told never to connect without encryption.

Uploaded files are encrypted at rest by Google Cloud Storage, which does that for everything it stores.

The database has no public address. The only thing reachable from the internet is the web server in front of the app, and the server’s firewall lets in web traffic and remote administration only.

Before every update to Ridgepole, a full copy of the database is taken, and the update stops if that copy fails. The newest five are kept, so a bad update can be undone.

Card and bank details are typed into Stripe’s own payment form and go straight to Stripe. They never pass through or get stored on Ridgepole’s servers. That holds for your subscription and for the payments your clients make on your invoices.

Client payments go into your own Stripe account. Ridgepole never holds your clients’ money.

A proposal or invoice that has been sent cannot be edited. To change one you void it, give a reason, and issue a new one. Deleting a record removes it from view rather than erasing it, and financial records are never erased.

When a client signs a proposal or a change order, Ridgepole records the name they signed with, the time, their IP address and the device they used.

No third-party analytics, no advertising trackers, and no cookies that follow you around the web. The only cookies and browser storage Ridgepole uses keep you signed in, plus Stripe’s own fraud-prevention cookies on the page where a client pays online.

No AI features, and your data is never used to train a model.

Your reports export to CSV at any time: costs, budgets, estimated against actual, profitability, labour, time entries, purchasing, accounts payable and sales tax. Documents and PDFs download from the job. Exports keep working even if your subscription lapses, so your records are never held back.

Under our Terms, your data stays available for export for 30 days after an account closes, then it is deleted from live systems. Copies can remain in backups for a while after that. Invoices and payment records are kept for the six years Canadian tax law requires.