Private records. Clear responsibilities.

What we retain

Customer agreement PDFs and email-verified signing receipts, external inspector-certified reports, pilot feedback, applications, credential documents, signed acknowledgments, assignments, client agreement evidence, reports and photos, certified report versions, payment/transfer references, tax documents, review decisions, discount/offer records and audit history. Practice and demonstration workspaces are not substitutes for retained live work.

Tax document access

W-9 PDFs are encrypted in a separate private vault. Only the submitting inspector and authorized owner may download them, and downloads are logged. General application fields and inspection notes must not contain Social Security numbers, tax IDs, banking credentials or tax PDFs. Banking details remain with Stripe. A W-9 clearance means manual document review, not automated IRS TIN matching, independent identity proof, tax advice or a filed return.

Operating retention schedule

We aim to retain business agreements, reports, financial records and related audit evidence for at least seven years after the relevant work or final transaction. W-9 records are retained for at least four years after the last payment they support, and longer when a legal hold, unresolved claim or applicable requirement calls for it. These are operating minimums, not a statement that one duration satisfies every legal, licensing, insurance or tax requirement. There is no automated deletion process. The owner reviews retention requests with the relevant professional before any disposal.

Corrections, access and holds

New tax submissions and changed legal/business details require renewed review. Prior tax forms, signed agreements and certified report versions remain retained. Legal holds pause record disposal; issued, submitted and billing-linked report records are already protected from normal deletion. Email utahestateinsights@gmail.com to request correction or discuss retained records. Do not email a W-9 or taxpayer identification number.

Backup and recovery procedure

1. In the private Records & Tax desk, select Pause site activity, refresh until in-progress requests reach zero, and start a backup. New site operations and payment updates receive a temporary retry response. The capture is stepwise and must not be represented as a transactional snapshot.
2. Let the copy finish. Each copied part is hashed and read back to verify its bytes. Interrupted runs can resume only within the same pause window. Resume site activity after the copy completes; the pause also expires after 15 minutes once any current backup step finishes. External payment pages can still accept payments, so reconcile delayed updates afterward.
3. Download the manifest and all listed parts to protected independent storage. Site-stored copies alone are not an offsite backup. Keep runtime secret recovery material separately in an authorized secret manager; never put it in the manifest.
4. To rehearse recovery, use an isolated empty environment with matching schema/source. Verify every part hash, restore business tables in dependency order and restore private stored objects under their original keys. Preserve the tax-vault encryption key separately, recreate authentication settings and verify account isolation, a signed record, a certified report and a tax-document decryption. Never overwrite production as a test.
5. Record the rehearsal result and reconcile Stripe transactions that occurred after capture. External bank statements, Stripe records, accountant-held files and filed tax forms need their own secure records.

Hash verification proves copy integrity. It does not prove a complete live restore, regulatory compliance, an independent backup, or tax filing. Runtime secrets, external payment records and login tokens are not part of business-record exports.