Putting your vendor rates, project margins and payroll into someone else’s software is a real decision. This page answers the questions that decision turns on: who owns the data, who can see it, and what happens to it if you leave. It also lists the questions worth putting to any vendor, including us.
Who owns your data
You do. Your projects, vendors, negotiated rates, drawings, employee records and financial history are your business records. Using software to store them does not change that.
Three commitments follow from it:
- You can export it, at any time, without asking permission.
- We do not sell customer data. Not aggregated, not anonymised, not to anyone.
- One customer’s commercial information is never used for another’s benefit. Your negotiated cement rate does not inform anyone else’s benchmark.
That third point deserves emphasis, because it is the one buyers rarely ask about and the one where the incentives run against you. A platform that sees thousands of purchase orders has an obvious commercial temptation. We do not do it.
How your data is kept separate
BuilderXPro is multi-tenant — many companies use the same application. The question that matters is how one company’s records are prevented from reaching another.
Separation is enforced at the database level, not only in application code. Every record carries an organisation identifier, and access rules are applied by the database itself. The practical consequence: a query cannot return another organisation’s rows even if the application above it were wrong.
That distinction matters because application-only isolation depends on every developer remembering a filter on every query, forever. Database-level enforcement does not depend on anyone remembering. Cross-organisation isolation is also covered by an automated test suite that verifies both reading and writing across two separate organisations, so a regression fails a test rather than reaching a customer.
Who can see what, inside your company
The more common risk is not another company seeing your data — it is your own site staff seeing project margin, or a junior approving a payment.
Access is controlled on three axes:
- Role — nine roles covering the usual construction hierarchy, from site engineer to director.
- Team — permissions can follow team membership rather than being set person by person.
- Data scope — All, Own-or-Team, or Own. This is what lets a project manager see their own sites and not the whole portfolio.
Per-user overrides exist for the cases every construction company has: the trusted accountant who needs one extra permission, the site engineer who is temporarily covering two projects.
A practical configuration most contractors want on day one: site engineers can raise indents and file progress, but cannot see vendor rates or project margin. That is a scope setting, not a custom build.
The audit trail
Actions across modules are logged — who did what, when, and in the case of approvals, with what note. Rate changes, approvals, payments and permission changes are all recorded.
The value shows up in disputes rather than in security incidents. When a sub-contractor claims a rate was agreed, or a payment is questioned six months later, a named person and a timestamp end the argument in minutes. Without it, the conversation is two memories against each other.
Getting your data out
The fair test of any SaaS vendor is how easily you can leave.
- Export is available while your account is active. Do it before an account lapses, not after.
- Archived projects stay readable and are not deleted — completed work does not vanish or count against your plan limits.
- Cancellation takes effect at the end of the period you have paid for, so you keep access through that window rather than losing it the moment you cancel.
- Vouchers can be exported to Tally throughout, which means your statutory accounting never depended on us in the first place.
That last point is the strongest protection available to you, and it is worth arranging with any vendor: if your books live in Tally and the ERP feeds it, then leaving costs you operational history rather than your accounts.
Questions to ask any vendor
Including us. If a vendor cannot answer these plainly, that is itself the answer:
- Is tenant separation enforced in the database, or only in application code?
- Can I restrict site staff from seeing margin and vendor rates? Show me.
- What exactly can I export, in what format, and can I do it myself?
- What happens to my data if I stop paying — is it deleted, and when?
- Do you use customer data to build benchmarks or train anything?
- Who internally can access my records, and is that access logged?
- Where is the data hosted, and can you confirm that in writing?
Question 3 is the one most often answered vaguely. “We can arrange an export” is a different answer from “you can download it yourself, today”.
For how permissions and approvals work in practice, see security and governance, or book a demo and ask to see the permission model configured against your own org chart.