Security and your data

1. Where your data is stored

Certificate records (the details you enter, who signed, when, and the status of each record) are held in a managed PostgreSQL database on Railway, the cloud platform that runs CertMate.

Generated PDFs and uploaded files (certificate PDFs, site photos, archived records, logos and signatures) are stored on persistent storage attached to that same platform.

Our hosting provider may locate servers outside New Zealand. How that is handled under the Privacy Act 2020 is set out in our Privacy Policy.

2. Backups

Every night, a copy of every uploaded file and a full export of the database is written to a separate storage provider (Cloudflare), independent of the platform that serves the app. If the primary platform were lost, your records exist somewhere else.

• Nightly database exports are kept for 30 days, and the first export of each month is kept for a year.
• Files are copied as they are added, so the off-site copy stays complete.
• We periodically restore from these backups to check they work, and each test is recorded.

Backups are a safety net for the platform. For your own records, you can download any certificate as a PDF at any time, or export every record in your account as a single ZIP.

3. How long we keep records

While your account is open, nothing is deleted unless you delete it. Records you remove are held in the archive for a period so they can be restored if the deletion was a mistake.

After an account ends, we keep your content for a minimum of two years so you can request access or an export, as set out in our Terms of Service. Your own professional or regulatory obligations may require you to keep electrical compliance records for longer, which is one reason the ZIP export exists.

4. Who can see your records

Every record belongs to one company account. Nobody outside that account can open it, with two deliberate exceptions you control:

• Inspector links. If you link an inspection company to a certificate, that company can read it until the record of inspection is done. The link only works once both companies have confirmed it, and you can unlink at any time.
• Public verification. Each completed certificate carries a QR code that opens a verification page showing the certificate details. That page is rate limited and shows completed certificates only.

Inside your account, owners and office admins can see every record. Other roles are limited by what their role is allowed to do.

CertMate staff. Only CertMate's own staff accounts can reach customer data, for support and fault-finding. Those accounts require two-factor authentication, and when staff view the app as a customer for support, that activity is kept separate from the customer's own usage records.

5. Security measures

• HTTPS everywhere. All traffic between your device and CertMate is encrypted in transit. Plain HTTP requests are redirected, and browsers are told to use HTTPS only (HSTS).
• Passwords. Never stored in plain text. CertMate uses Django's password hashing, and passwords must meet minimum length and common-password checks.
• Login protection. Sign-in, password reset and registration are rate limited, by address and by account, to slow down guessing attacks.
• File access. Certificate PDFs, photos and other uploads are served only to a signed-in member of the company that owns them (or a linked inspection company). Uploads are limited to document and image types.
• Integration credentials. Tokens for job-management integrations such as Fergus and Simpro are stored encrypted. API keys issued to partners are stored as hashes and shown once.
• Monitoring. Application errors are reported to an error-monitoring service without personal data, and every change to CertMate runs through an automated test suite and a dependency vulnerability scan before release.

6. Your data is yours

CertMate does not sell your data or share it with third parties for their own purposes. Your records are used solely to operate the service for you, and the providers we rely on act on our instructions. They are named in our Privacy Policy.

You can leave whenever you want and take everything with you: any certificate as a PDF, or the whole account as a ZIP, with one click.

7. Reporting a concern

If you believe you have found a security problem in CertMate, or you are worried about how your data has been handled, email hello@certmate.co.nz. A real person reads it, and we would rather hear about a problem than not.