Terms of Service

Effective: {EFFECTIVE_DATE}

These terms are the agreement between you and {LEGAL_ENTITY} (ABN {ABN}) - "we", "us" - for your use of Longshift at longshift.com.au and in the iOS app. By creating an account you agree to them. If you don't, don't create one.

We've tried to write these in plain English and to keep them fair. Longshift's customers are sole traders and small businesses, and Australian law is strict about unfair terms in small-business contracts - so there's no term here that lets us change the deal without telling you, lock you in, or hold you liable for things outside your control.

1. What Longshift is

Longshift is a record-keeping and invoicing tool for sole traders and small trade crews: schedule your week, run a timer, keep a job log with stamped photo proof, produce a weekly invoice, and chase it if it isn't paid. The product you work in is an iOS app. The website at longshift.com.au is for signup, account, and these legal pages.

Longshift is a record-keeping and invoicing tool, not advice. It does not give you tax, accounting, legal or financial advice. What your invoice says, whether you've charged GST correctly, whether your ABN details are right, whether your records satisfy the ATO - that's on you and your accountant. We built the arithmetic carefully and we test it, but you're responsible for checking your own invoices before you send them. The same goes for your obligations as an employer: rostering, pay rates, awards and the Fair Work Act are between you, your workers and your advisers - Longshift records what you decide, and may prompt you to ask your workers a question the law expects you to ask, but it never determines what the law requires of you.

2. Your account

• You need a valid email address. Keep your password to yourself; you're responsible for what happens under your account. Google sign-in is optional; every core flow works with email and password alone.
• One account is for one person. You can invite others into your workspace as workers, and access isn't all-or-nothing. A worker can: see and edit every client, property and scheduled day in the workspace, plus your business and invoicing settings; see every recurring invoice draft, including the amount already on it, and add new draft entries; and see only the time entries and job logs they were personally part of, never a co-worker's - you, as the account owner, see all of them. A worker cannot see your finished invoices, your invoice numbering, your per-client rates, or your subscription details - those stay visible to you alone. So invite people you'd trust with your whole client list and job book, not just people you'd hand your own timesheet to.
• Tell us at support@longshift.com.au if you think someone's got into your account.
• You must be at least 18 and using Longshift for a business.

3. Subscription and payment

• Longshift costs {PRICE} per month, including GST, unless we've agreed something else with you in writing.
• Payments are processed by Stripe. We never see or store your card number.
• Your subscription renews automatically each period until you cancel. Cancel any time from your account settings, or by emailing support@longshift.com.au.
• Cancelling takes effect at the end of the period you've already paid for. You keep access until then. We don't pro-rata refund an unused part of a period - but see section 9: nothing here cuts across your rights under the Australian Consumer Law, and if we've done something wrong we'll make it right.
• If there's a free trial, it runs for {TRIAL_DAYS} days, needs no card up front, and simply stops at the end unless you subscribe.
• We'll give you at least 30 days' notice by email before any price rise. If you don't want the new price, cancel before it starts.
• If a payment fails we'll email you and retry. If it's still unpaid after 14 days we may suspend the account. Your data isn't deleted at that point - see section 11.

4. Your data is yours

You own everything you put into Longshift - your job logs, photos, clients, invoices, rates and business details. We claim no ownership of it.

You give us the permission we need to operate: to store your data, transmit it, display it back to you, generate the documents you ask for, and copy it into any backups we operate. That permission ends when your data is deleted. It is a permission, not a promise - see section 9.3 on backups.

You also give us permission to use it to make Longshift better. Testing, measuring, debugging and improving the product means working with the real thing - real job logs, real photos, real notes, and what you did with what Longshift produced from them. Invented examples only tell us how Longshift handles invented work. So while we hold your data, we may use it to test, measure, debug and improve Longshift itself. That is a use for our benefit as well as yours, and we would rather say so plainly than hide it inside "operating the service".

Four things we will not do with it, whatever the reason:

• We won't sell it, rent it or trade it. Not to anyone, at any price.
• We won't mine it to build a product for someone else. What we learn from your work goes back into Longshift and nowhere else. The one thing this does not reach is the rate band: what a trade charges for a kind of work, in a place, as a reciprocal opt-in count. You see the band only if you contribute to it. It does not exist until a floor of contributing workspaces is met. It carries prices only - never a client identity, never a job, never a name.
• We won't use it to compete with you. Not your client list, not your job book, and not your rates except as they contribute to that same band.
• We won't give any AI model provider the right to train on it. Where Longshift sends your work to a model in order to do your job, we only use providers whose terms rule that training out.

Deleting still means deleting. Both permissions above - operating, and improving - run only while we hold your data. Delete it, or ask us to, and they end with it, on the timetable in section 11 and the Privacy Policy. What outlives your data is only what stops being about you or your clients: counts, rates and measurements of how the product performed. "Proposed drafts were edited 31% of the time" is not your data and we keep it. The job log behind it is, and we don't.

If we ever want to keep something of yours as a test case - an actual job log or set of notes, held on after you would otherwise have deleted it - we'll ask you, for that record, and you can say no. Silence isn't a yes and using Longshift isn't a yes.

You can ask for a copy of your data at any time, and you can take it and leave.

5. Your clients' information

Longshift holds information about people who never signed up with us - your clients. You're the one who collected it, so you're the one responsible for it. You agree that:

• you have the right to collect and store the client information you put into Longshift, including information that arrives because you forwarded an invoice, connected an accounting system, or photographed a job;
• you'll handle it lawfully, including under the Privacy Act where it applies to you, and you'll tell your own clients how you handle their information;
• you'll only photograph what you're entitled to capture on a job, and you understand that Longshift burns the job address, date and time into every photo - including copies you send on;
• you understand that sending a job log - by email, or through your phone's share sheet - sends the notes, address and photos to that recipient, and neither you nor we can recall it afterwards;
• you won't use Longshift to send unsolicited marketing. Invoices, reminders and job records to a client you actually worked for are fine. Bulk marketing is not, and the Spam Act 2003 is your problem, not ours.

We process that information on your instructions. Our side of it is set out in the Privacy Policy.

6. What you can't do

Don't use Longshift to break the law, to store data you have no right to hold, or to harass anyone. Don't attempt to access another workspace's data, probe or attack the service, scrape it, resell it, or run it as a white-label product for others. Don't upload malware or anything unlawful. Don't automate it in a way that degrades it for other users.

If you find a security hole, please tell us at support@longshift.com.au before you tell anyone else. We'll thank you properly and we won't come after you for reporting it in good faith.

7. Availability

We want Longshift up all the time and we watch it. But:

• We don't promise any particular uptime. There's no SLA and no service credits at this price.
• We may take it down for maintenance or ship changes; we'll avoid business hours where we can.
• Longshift depends on services we don't control - Google Cloud, Stripe, Anthropic, TypeSafe, Resend, your mobile network, and your own Google account if you've connected Drive. If one of those is down, some of Longshift will be too.
• Longshift works offline by design: your recent data is cached on your device and writes queue up and sync when you're back in range. That covers a lot of outages, but it isn't a guarantee.
• We may add, change or remove features. If we remove something you actually rely on, we'll email you first and give you a way out.

8. Third-party connections

Importing from Xero is optional and one-time: we read contacts, invoice line items and tax settings, then destroy the credential. The import keeps no access token. Re-importing costs a fresh sign-in. Proposals become workspace data only when you confirm them.

Connecting Xero as your ledger is a separate, optional choice, and it is different: it stores a credential. Once you connect, we keep your Xero access and refresh tokens on our servers, encrypted, so Longshift can keep working without asking you to sign in again. The import's credential is never used for this, and this one is never used for an import. After Longshift sends an invoice, we write a copy of it into your Xero as an approved invoice, and we may create a Xero contact for your client if none matches. Xero does not email your client: we never ask it to, so your client still gets the one invoice we sent. We read back payments recorded in Xero against the invoices we copied, so we can stop chasing an invoice that has already been paid. A payment that clears an invoice holds the chase, but only you mark the invoice paid. If you correct an invoice after sending it, we do not change the approved copy in Xero; we tell you, and you correct it there. You can revoke the connection at any time: we delete the stored credential and release the connection in Xero, and nothing more is written or read.

Google Drive, if you connected it on the older web app, used your own Google account under Google's terms. Files that already ended up in your Drive are yours to manage. New photos are stored by us in Cloud Storage, not in Drive. We can't control, and aren't responsible for, what Google does with a leftover connection. Longshift's core features all work without any Google account connected.

9. Consumer guarantees and our liability

Nothing in these terms excludes, restricts or modifies any guarantee, right or remedy you have under the Australian Consumer Law or any other law that can't be excluded by agreement. If a guarantee applies to something we supply, and we fail to meet it, you have rights we can't take away.

Read the next two parts as separate. They don't stack.

9.1 If we fail to meet a consumer guarantee

Longshift is a business tool - services of a kind not ordinarily acquired for personal, domestic or household use. Where the law permits us to limit our liability for failing to comply with a consumer guarantee in relation to such services, our liability is limited, at our election, to:

• supplying the service again; or
• paying the cost of having the service supplied again.

Nothing else in this section applies to a claim for failing to meet a consumer guarantee. The monetary cap in 9.2, and the exclusions in 9.2, do not apply to those claims.

9.2 Every other claim

For any other claim - in contract, in negligence, under statute, or otherwise - and to the maximum extent the law allows:

• Cap. Our total liability to you for everything arising out of Longshift, in any 12-month period, is capped at the greater of A$100 and the subscription fees you actually paid us in the 12 months before the claim.
• Excluded loss. We are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, loss of profit, loss of revenue, loss of business or business opportunity, or loss of goodwill.
• What we're not responsible for. Anything caused by your own act or omission, by a failure of a service we don't control, by your device or connection, or by information you or your clients entered incorrectly.

9.3 Keep your own copies

We are not your archive of record, and we don't promise that a backup of your data exists or that we can restore one. Australian tax law makes you keep your business records for five years, so export your invoices and keep your own copies. If something matters to your business, don't let Longshift be the only place it lives.

9.4 Your clients' claims

You are responsible for claims brought against us by your own clients that arise from your use of Longshift - for example, a dispute about an invoice you issued, or about information you stored about them - except to the extent we caused the problem.

10. Suspension

We may suspend or restrict your account if payment fails and stays unpaid, if you're using Longshift in a way that breaks section 5 or 6, or if we're required to by law. Except where the problem is serious or unlawful, we'll email you first and give you a reasonable chance to fix it.

11. Ending it

• You can leave any time. Cancel in settings or email support@longshift.com.au. You keep access until the end of your paid period. Deleting your account in the app (Account, then Delete account) also cancels your subscription, when the deletion runs after a seven-day hold, with no refund for the rest of the period - see section 3.
• We can end it by giving you 30 days' notice by email, or immediately if you seriously breach these terms or use Longshift unlawfully. If we end it for convenience, we'll refund the unused part of your current period.
• What happens to your data. When your subscription ends, you can still see everything, but you can't make or send invoices. 30 days after it ends, the workspace becomes read-only for everyone in it. 12 months after it ends, we delete it. We'll email you before we delete it. You can also delete it sooner yourself, in the app - see the deletion page.
• Sections 4, 5, 9 and 14 survive the end of this agreement.

12. Changes to these terms

We'll email you at least 30 days before any change that materially affects you, and post the new version at longshift.com.au. If you don't accept it, cancel before it takes effect - that's your remedy. Continuing to use Longshift after it starts means you've accepted it. We won't make retrospective changes.

13. Privacy

The Privacy Policy at longshift.com.au forms part of this agreement.

14. General

• Governing law. The laws of {STATE}, Australia, and the courts of {STATE} (and courts that hear appeals from them) have jurisdiction. That doesn't stop you bringing a matter somewhere a law says you may.
• Whole agreement. These terms and the Privacy Policy are the whole agreement between us about Longshift.
• Severability. If a term is unenforceable, it's cut back only as far as needed; the rest stands.
• No waiver. If we don't enforce something straight away, we haven't given it up.
• Assignment. You can't transfer your account without our agreement. We can transfer this agreement if the business is sold, but we'll tell you first and your terms don't get worse.
• Notices. We'll email the address on your account. You email support@longshift.com.au.

15. Contact

support@longshift.com.au - {LEGAL_ENTITY}, ABN {ABN}.