Privacy Policy

Who we are

Better Venue is operated by B.J Hill & J.P Streater, a partnership trading as Better Venue, ABN 27 326 253 280.

Contact: hello@bettervenue.ai

We handle personal information in line with the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) and the Australian Privacy Principles (APPs).

What we collect

Account details. Name, work email, the venue or group you belong to, and your role in it.

Venue operating data you enter or connect. Stock lists and counts, recipes and yields, supplier details and prices, purchase orders and deliveries, invoices and bills, wastage entries, menus, sales from your point of sale, and rosters from your rostering system.

Usage. Which features are used and how often, so we can run the service, size your plan and find faults.

Payment. Handled by Stripe. We never see or store card numbers.

Email. Only if you connect a mailbox — see below.

Photos. Camera counts, and only kept if an owner opts in — see below.

What we do NOT collect or store

Stated plainly because each one is a deliberate design decision, not an oversight:

• We do not store the body of your emails. Only summaries and details. Message text is fetched when needed and discarded.
• Files you attach to a chat with Sous are read and discarded. A saved conversation keeps only the file's name and type — never its contents.
• What Sous remembers about your venue never holds prices, quantities, pars or stock figures, or anything taken from a file. Those live in your records, where they stay current.
• We keep no card numbers.
• We do not track you across other websites, and there is no advertising in Better Venue.

Sous, and your conversations

Your chat history is private to you. Each conversation belongs to the person who had it, in the venue they had it in. Nobody else can list, open or read it — not your manager, not the venue's owner, and not another venue you also work at. There is deliberately no feature that lets them.

What Sous changed in the venue's records is a separate thing, and is visible to owners and managers in the activity log, because that is the venue's business record.

What Sous remembers is only what a person has confirmed it should remember. Sous suggests; a person approves. There are two kinds: notes about how the venue runs, which everyone there benefits from, and notes about how you personally like to work, which only you can see, change or remove.

When you leave a venue's team, your conversations and the personal notes Sous kept about you are deleted. What you taught it about the venue stays, because that belongs to the venue.

The inbox agent and your email

Connecting a mailbox is optional and is done by you, signing in to Google or Microsoft and approving the access shown.

What it can do. Read messages and attachments in the connected mailbox, and create draft replies in that mailbox.

What it cannot do. Send, delete, move, label or forward mail, or open links in your email. These are not settings: the ability does not exist in Better Venue.

What we do with it. Each new message is read once to produce a short summary, a one-line reason for its priority, and a status. For supplier bills, the attached invoice is read and saved to your Invoices. Where a reply is expected and we are confident, a draft is written into your own drafts folder for you to review and send. If you tick "make drafts sound like me", about 60 of your recent sent emails are read once to produce a short description of your writing style; the emails themselves are not kept.

What is never read. Mail matching your exclusions, by sender or subject, is not opened, summarised or stored. We suggest exclusions for payroll, banking, HR, legal, medical and government mail when you connect, and you can add your own.

Who sees it. A personal mailbox's brief is visible only to the person who connected it. A shared mailbox such as accounts@ is visible to that venue's owners and managers. Better Venue staff do not read your email, except with your explicit permission for specific messages (for example to investigate a fault you report), where necessary to investigate abuse or a security incident, or where the law requires it.

Google user data. Better Venue's use and transfer to any other app of information received from Google APIs adheres to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements. Use of information received from Google Workspace APIs adheres to the Google Workspace API user data and developer policy.

Microsoft data. Access to Microsoft 365 mail is used only for the purposes described here. You can review and revoke access at myapps.microsoft.com (work accounts) or account.live.com/consent/Manage (personal). Google access can be revoked at myaccount.google.com/permissions.

Disconnecting. When you disconnect a mailbox, leave the venue's team, or the venue is archived, we delete our access tokens, the summaries held for that mailbox, your writing-style description and your exclusions. Invoices already captured remain as the venue's business records. Drafts already in your mailbox are yours.

Count photos (optional, off by default)

When you count stock with the camera, photos are sent to our AI provider to be read and are then discarded. We do not keep them.

An owner can switch on "Help improve counting" for a venue. It is off unless they do. While it is on, when someone confirms how full a part-used bottle, tub or keg is during a camera count, we keep that photo together with the level they set, to train and test models that read fill levels more accurately.

• Only frames where a person confirmed a level are kept. Nothing from voice or typed counts.
• They are photos of shelves, coolrooms and bars, so they may incidentally show your premises. We do not look for, identify or label people in them. Please avoid photographing people.
• They are stored in our own private database with no public link.
• If we ever use a specialist provider to train on them, we will name that provider here and tell opted-in venues first. We will not sell them or use them for anything but improving counting.
• An owner can switch it off and delete every photo kept, from Settings. Archiving a venue deletes them. Models already trained on a photo are not retrained when it is deleted.
• Your team sees a notice on the camera screen whenever it is on.

Other people's information

If you connect a rostering system, invite staff, or upload documents containing personal information, you are giving us information about other people. You are responsible for being entitled to do that and for telling them, as your own privacy obligations require. We handle it on your instructions and as described here.

Who we share it with

We do not sell personal information. We share it only with the providers we need to run the service:

Sending information overseas (APP 8). Your venue's records are stored and processed in Australia. Two things leave the country:

• Text, photos and documents sent to Anthropic in the United States, to produce the answer, summary or draft you asked for. Under Anthropic's commercial terms this is not used to train their models.
• Email we send on your behalf, through Resend in Japan — including purchase orders you send to your suppliers.

By using those features you consent to that disclosure.

Security

• Access tokens for connected systems are encrypted at rest (AES-256-GCM).
• Access is restricted by venue and by role, and checked on the server for every request — not merely hidden in the interface.
• Every change made through an agent or an approval is recorded in an append-only activity log with who did it.
• Email and uploaded files are treated as untrusted: hidden text is stripped, instruction-like content is detected and flagged to you, and an agent cannot act on instructions found inside them.
• The application sends a strict Content-Security-Policy, and the product runs on its own host separate from our marketing site so a signed-in session is never exposed to it.

No system is perfectly secure. If a data breach occurs that is likely to cause you serious harm, we will notify you and the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner as the Notifiable Data Breaches scheme requires. Our security contact is hello@bettervenue.ai.

Cookies

We use a small number of cookies, and none for advertising:

• a sign-in session cookie, so you stay signed in;
• a cookie remembering which venue you last opened, which is only a preference and is checked against what you are actually allowed to open on every request;
• a cookie marking that you are exploring the sample venue;
• a short-lived cookie carrying an invitation through sign-up.

How long we keep it

Venue data is kept while the account is active. Sous conversations are kept up to 200 per person per venue, oldest first. After an account ends, data is kept for 90 days and then deleted, unless you ask us to delete it sooner or the law requires us to keep it longer — tax records, for instance.

Archiving a venue is reversible and does not delete anything, except count photos, which are deleted. Permanent deletion of a venue is never a button; ask us and we will do it.

Your rights

You can ask for access to, or correction of, the personal information we hold about you, and complain about how we have handled it, at hello@bettervenue.ai. We will respond within 30 days.

If you are not satisfied with our response, you can complain to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner at oaic.gov.au.

Email we send you

We send emails you need in order to use the service: sign-in codes, invitations, trial reminders, your daily brief if you have switched it on, and copies of orders you send. You cannot opt out of the ones needed to operate your account.

Any marketing email will identify us and carry a working unsubscribe, as the Spam Act 2003 (Cth) requires.

Changes

We will tell you before a material change to this policy, and ask for your agreement again where a change materially affects how we use your email or your photos.