Privacy Policy

1. What this covers

This policy covers the Optimal Plumbing website at optimalplumb.com, the Optimal Plumbing app for Android, and the customer account (portal) you can be invited to. The app is the website, shown full-screen on a phone: everything below applies to both the same way.

We are a small plumbing business. We collect what we need to schedule, do and bill the work, and nothing we cannot explain here.

2. What we collect

When you book a visit, ask for a quote, or use the website chat, we collect your name, phone number, email address, the service address, and whatever you tell us about the problem.

When you have a customer account we keep your service history: the jobs done at your property, the quotes and invoices, and any photos or documents attached to them.

When you pay online, your card or bank details go directly to our payment processor over its own secure form. We do not receive or store your full card number or bank account number — only a reference to the payment, the last four digits, and the card brand or bank name so that you and we can see which method was used.

When you authorise a payment method to be kept on file, or approve a quote online, we keep a record of that authorisation: the terms you agreed to, the name you typed as your signature, and the date and time.

Our servers record the ordinary technical details of a visit — your IP address, browser type and the pages requested — which we use to keep the site working and to stop automated abuse of the booking form and the chat.

3. How we use it

To schedule, perform and invoice the work you ask for; to contact you about an appointment, a quote or a payment; and to keep the history of your property so a later visit goes faster.

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

4. Who else sees it

The service providers that make the business run, and only to the extent needed for the job they do for us:

• Our hosting provider, on whose servers the website and its database run.
• Our payment processor, which handles cards and bank payments and holds the card and account details we never see.
• Telegram, which carries website chat messages to our office phones so that somebody can answer. What you type in the chat box, and the name and contact details you give with it, reach our office through a Telegram chat.
• Google (Firebase Cloud Messaging), which delivers notifications to the phones of our own staff. A notification carries a short summary — a name, a service, an amount, an address — of the booking, quote, payment or chat message it is about.
• An address-lookup service, which sees the street address being typed so that it can suggest the complete one.

We may also disclose information where the law requires it, or to collect a debt that is genuinely owed.

5. The Android app

The app shows the website using the phone's own browser engine and shares its sign-in with it. It asks for no permission except to show notifications, and only staff accounts receive any.

For staff, the app registers the phone for office alerts. That stores a push token issued by Google, the phone's model name and the app version, tied to the staff account signed in. A staff member can see and remove their own phones in Settings. Nothing about a customer's phone is stored: a customer's device is never registered.

Staff can attach photos of the work to a job — a leak, a fixture, a receipt — taken with the camera or picked from the gallery at that moment. The app does not read photos otherwise.

6. Cookies

We use cookies only to keep you signed in, to protect forms against forgery, to remember your light-or-dark display choice, to keep a website chat connected to you while it is open, and — in the app only — to hold the phone's notification token until a staff sign-in claims it. There are no advertising or tracking cookies and no third-party analytics.

7. How long we keep it

Customer, job and billing records are kept for as long as we serve you and for the period tax and accounting rules require after that. Website chat transcripts are kept with the customer record they belong to. Server logs are kept for a short period and then discarded.

A booking request we decline, or a chat that never became a customer, is kept only as long as it is useful to answer you.

8. Your choices

You can ask us to show you, correct, or delete the information we hold about you by contacting the office. We will do so except where a record has to be kept — a completed invoice, for example, must be retained for tax purposes even after a request.

You can revoke a payment authorisation at any time by contacting us. Revoking does not affect charges already processed.

You can turn off the app's notifications in your phone's settings at any time; that stops alerts on that phone and nothing else.

9. Security

The site is served only over HTTPS. Passwords are stored as salted hashes. Links that open a quote, a payment page or an account invitation carry a long random token that is stored only as a hash, so a copy of the database does not give those links away. Card and bank details are never on our servers at all.

10. Children

Our services are for adults arranging work on a property. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 18.

11. Changes to this policy

When we change what we collect or how we use it, this page is updated and the date at the top changes. The wording in effect on a given day is what applies to what happened that day.

12. Contact

Questions about this policy, or a request to see, correct or delete your information, go to the office: