Privacy policy

Effective October 13, 2026

This policy covers the Mountain Landscapers portal at quotes.mtnlandscapers.com. It is a private tool, not a public website. Three kinds of people reach it: our own staff, who sign in to price, sell and run jobs; our crews, whose hours a crew lead records; and our customers, who open a private link to view, sign and pay for an estimate, and who can sign in to a customer portal to follow their work.

The portal is also where our crews run a job once it is sold (clocking hours, photographing receipts, recording progress), and it connects to our own QuickBooks company, bank feed and payment account to keep the books.

The short version: we hold what we need to price your job, build it, get paid and account for it. We do not sell anything, and we never share a mobile number with anyone for marketing.

If you are a customer

Your estimate link is private and unlisted. Opening it does not need a password. The page shows the work we quoted, the scope and the price.

The estimate contains the details we need to price the job, typically your name, the property address, a phone number or email, and a description of the work. That information comes from the record we already keep about you as a customer.

When you sign, we record:

• the name you type and the signature you draw, including how long it took to draw;
• the exact consent wording you ticked, and its version;
• the date and time, the IP address it came from, and your browser type;
• a fingerprint (hash) of the document, so nobody can change it afterwards without that showing.

That is how we evidence what was agreed. Change orders are signed the same way.

We record when you open your estimate and when you open the payment page. We keep the date and time of the first and most recent time each was opened, and a count of how many separate visits there have been; repeated loads within half an hour count as one visit. We do this so we know whether an estimate reached you before we chase it. We do not record what you clicked, how far you scrolled, how long you stayed, or anything about your device beyond the ordinary server logs described below. This is visible only to Mountain Landscapers staff. If you would rather we did not keep it, tell us and we will remove it.

Paying. Payments are handled by Stripe:

• Your details go straight to Stripe. Card and bank details are entered into Stripe's own secure fields, and we never see or store a full card or bank account number.
• Saving a payment method. If you save one for next time, Stripe keeps it and we keep only Stripe's reference to it.
• Connecting your bank. If you link a bank account, you sign in to your bank through Stripe, not through us.
• Maintenance autopay. If you sign up for automatic payment of a maintenance plan, we charge the bank account you authorised, on the schedule you agreed.

We may also send you a bill for work that is not an estimate, which you pay the same way.

The customer portal. You can sign in with a six-digit code sent to an email address that appears on your estimate. For each person who can sign in we keep:

• their email address and name;
• what they may see;
• who invited them;
• when they last signed in.

To slow down repeated attempts we keep a scrambled form of the email address and of the IP address that tried to sign in.

If your job is under way, the estimate page and portal also show progress photographs of the work, normally the job itself rather than people. Tell us if you would rather we did not post them and we will stop.

If we offer financing, the link takes you to the lender (currently GreenSky). What you give the lender is covered by the lender's own privacy policy.

If you are Mountain Landscapers staff

Your account holds your name, email address, phone number, a one-way hash of your password (never the password itself), your role, and a one-way hash of your four-digit PIN. We store the estimates you create and a history of changes to them.

Time off. Everyone who signs in can see the days people have asked for and booked off, so the office can plan crews around them. What those days are paid stays private, with the pay information described below.

The assistant. Your conversations with the assistant, and any photos, PDFs or video stills you give it, are stored under your account so you can pick a conversation back up. The owner can read assistant conversations and download a copy, to see how the assistant is being used.

Calls. Calls you place or answer in the portal go through the Salt CRM's business phone line, which uses Twilio, and are logged on the customer's record in the CRM, just as if you had made them in the CRM.

If you are on a Mountain Landscapers crew

Crew members do not have portal accounts. We keep a record for each person (first name, last name, job title, and whether they are currently active) so a crew lead can clock them on and off a job.

The time clock records who was clocked to which job, when they started and stopped, and which crew lead did the clocking. At the end of a day the crew lead answers two questions about the day, which management can read.

Location at clock-in and clock-out. Each time someone is clocked in or out, the portal records where the phone doing the clocking is at that moment: one point, with its accuracy and the time of the reading. It does not follow anyone between punches or record a trail. We use it to confirm where work started and ended. Office managers can see these points, and so can the crew lead who records the punches. They are kept with the time records.

Pay information. We store each person's position, how they are paid (hourly, salary or commission), their pay rate, salary or commission percentage, and their paid time-off allowance. This is used to work out job labour costs and crew bonuses.

• Only owners and admins can set it, and each person can see their own.
• The pay rates themselves are kept encrypted.

Gusto still runs payroll. The portal produces a file of names and hours, which a manager downloads and uploads to Gusto by hand; the portal does not send anything to Gusto by itself.

Receipts and job costs

When someone buys materials for a job they photograph the receipt in the portal. We keep the image, what was on it, and how the money was split across jobs. Receipts are tax records and we keep them for as long as the law requires us to be able to substantiate a deduction.

A receipt photograph is sent to Anthropic's API to be read, so the portal can fill in the vendor, date and amounts instead of someone typing them. A till receipt can carry the last four digits of a card and sometimes a cardholder name, so that is part of what is read. Anthropic does not use this to train its models. Full card numbers are not printed on receipts and are not collected here. If you would rather a receipt were not photographed, the amounts can be typed in by hand instead.

Our bank feed

The portal reads transactions from Mountain Landscapers' own business card and checking account through Plaid, so a purchase can be put on a job when it happens. This is our company's banking, not a customer's. The key that reaches the account is held encrypted, and the connection can be removed at any time.

QuickBooks

The portal connects to Mountain Landscapers' own QuickBooks Online company. This is our accounting data, not a customer's.

With that connection the portal:

• reads our chart of accounts, our customer and project list, our vendor list, and the expense and deposit entries around a receipt's date (to suggest which card paid it and to check what it has posted), so a cost can be matched to the right account and the right job;
• writes expense entries (the vendor, date, amount, expense account and the job it belongs to) built from the receipts described above.

It does not read or write invoices, payroll or banking data, and it asks for no permission beyond accounting.

The connection runs through Intuit's app registration held by Salt Services, which built and maintains this portal for us as our service provider, so the QuickBooks sign-in screen names Salt Services. It is authorised once by an administrator of our QuickBooks company. The access tokens it produces are held in encrypted private storage, are never sent to a browser, and are not stored in our source code. The connection can be revoked at any time from QuickBooks under Apps, or from inside the portal. QuickBooks data is used only to keep our own books and is never sold or shared for anyone's marketing.

The estimating assistant and AI

Three features send information to Anthropic's Claude AI:

• the estimator (job details and our price list);
• the receipt reader (the receipt photograph, and a list of our open jobs with their material budgets);
• the assistant (what staff ask it, the records it needs to answer, and any files they give it).

Before anything goes to the assistant, profit margins, labour costs and wages are removed. The only exception is when an owner or admin has unlocked those figures with their PIN. Anthropic does not use this information to train its models. Prices on an estimate are always worked out by the portal's own pricing rules, not by the AI.

Maps and aerial images

To show an aerial view of a property, the portal looks up the job address with Esri's geocoder. It then fetches imagery for that spot from the Tennessee Department of Transportation, the US Geological Survey, Google Maps or Microsoft Azure Maps. Those services receive the address or its map coordinates, never a name.

Text messages and email

We send texts and emails through our CRM (the Salt CRM, and LeadConnector/GoHighLevel, which we call Coraline, while we move off it):

• To staff: login codes, password resets, account invitations, task notices, and reminders to start and end the day and to take job photos.
• To customers: estimates, bills and payment links, customer-portal invitations and sign-in codes, and notices about a change request or a payment received.

These are messages about your account or your job, not marketing.

Message frequency varies; message and data rates may apply. Reply STOP to opt out, HELP for help. No mobile information will be shared with third parties or affiliates for marketing or promotional purposes. Opt-in data and consent are not shared with any third party.

Collected automatically

Our host records standard server logs (IP address, browser, pages requested, timestamps), which we use to keep the service running and to investigate abuse.

The portal sets four cookies, all strictly functional:

• portal_session keeps staff signed in;
• portal_device remembers a trusted device for up to 90 days, so a code is not needed every time;
• portal_unlock keeps a PIN-protected area open for 15 minutes;
• customer_session keeps a customer signed in to the customer portal.

Your browser also keeps a few display settings and a copy of our price list on your own device.

There are no advertising or analytics trackers of any kind in this portal: no third-party pixels, no ad networks, no profiling, and nothing that follows you to any other website. The one thing we record about your own visit is described above, the date and time you opened your own estimate or payment page. That stays with us, is tied to your job rather than to you as a person across the internet, and is never sold or shared for marketing.

Our typefaces are served from this domain. Three outside services load their own code, only on the pages that need them, and so see your IP address:

• Stripe, on payment pages;
• Plaid, when an administrator connects our bank;
• Twilio, when staff use the phone.

Who else handles this information

We use a small number of service providers, and only to operate the portal:

• Vercel: hosting and encrypted storage for accounts, estimates, photos and records.
• Stripe: customer payments, saved payment methods, and our payment reports.
• Plaid: our own business card and bank transactions, as described above.
• Intuit: QuickBooks Online, where our job costs are recorded, as described above.
• Salt CRM and LeadConnector / GoHighLevel (which we call Coraline): our customer records and appointments, and delivery of the texts and emails described above.
• Twilio: the business phone line used for calls from the portal, through the Salt CRM.
• Anthropic: the estimator, the receipt reader and the assistant, as described above. Anthropic does not use this to train its models.
• Esri, Google Maps, Microsoft Azure Maps, the US Geological Survey and the Tennessee Department of Transportation: aerial images and address lookup, as described above.
• GitHub: our weekly backups, stored privately and kept for 90 days.
• Salt Services LLC: the agency that built and maintains this portal for us. Their staff hold administrative access in order to support it, which means they can reach the data described in this policy. They act on our instructions and do not use it for anything else.

We do not sell personal information, and we do not share it with anyone for their own marketing. We will disclose information if the law requires it.

How long we keep it

• Estimates are business records, kept for as long as we may need them for accounting, warranty or dispute purposes. A signed estimate and any receipt attached to a job cannot be deleted from the portal at all; they are the evidence of what was agreed and what a job cost.
• Time-clock records, including their location points, are kept as payroll records.
• Pay information is kept while someone works for us and as long as payroll records must be kept afterwards.
• Assistant conversations are kept unless you ask us to delete yours.
• Staff accounts are removed when someone leaves. A crew member's record is marked inactive rather than erased, because their past hours belong to payroll history.
• Backups are kept for 90 days.
• Server logs age out on our host's ordinary schedule.

Security

Staff access requires a password, plus a code sent by text or email on a new device. Passwords and PINs are stored only as one-way hashes. Repeated wrong codes and PINs lock the account for a while. Cost and margin figures are removed on the server before they are sent to anyone whose role should not see them, rather than merely hidden on screen. Storage is private and encrypted, and the keys to our QuickBooks, bank feed and staff pay rates are encrypted again on top of that. No system is perfectly secure and we do not claim otherwise.

Children

This portal is a business tool and is not directed to children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect their information.

Your rights

You may ask for a copy of what we hold about you, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it. Contact us at mtnlandscapers@mtnlandscapers.com or (865) 280-4642. We honor these requests regardless of which state you live in.

Changes and contact

If we change this policy we will update it here with a new effective date. Questions: mtnlandscapers@mtnlandscapers.com or (865) 280-4642, Mountain Landscapers, LLC, 3225 Douglas Dam Rd, Kodak, TN 37764.