Privacy Policy
Last updated: October 17, 2026
Route Balance LLC (“Route Balance,” “we,” “us”) provides back-office software to independent mobile tool franchise operators (“Franchisees”) who serve their own customers (“End Customers”) under a franchise agreement with a national tool brand. This Privacy Policy explains what data we collect, how we use it, and the rights you have.
This policy applies to:
- —Franchisees who subscribe to Route Balance.
- —End Customers whose data Franchisees process through Route Balance.
- —Visitors to routebalance.com.
For data Franchisees upload about their End Customers, Route Balance acts as a data processor on behalf of the Franchisee. The Franchisee is the data controller. Our agreement with the Franchisee governs that relationship: for pilot Franchisees, the Pilot Agreement and its Schedule 1; for any other Franchisee, the Data Processing Agreement (“DPA”).
1. What We Collect
1.1 Franchisee account data
Name, email, business name, mailing address, phone, franchise dealer code, and authentication credentials when you sign up.
1.2 Billing data
Pilot seats are free and we do not take a Franchisee’s card. If a Franchisee later agrees to paid terms in writing, we keep the Stripe customer ID, plan, and billing history; card details stay with Stripe — Route Balance holds only Stripe-issued tokens.
1.3 Operational data Franchisees upload
- —End Customer contact information (name, business name, phone, email, mailing address).
- —Account balances, payment history, promises to pay, credit decisions.
- —Stop histories, queue items, product delivery records.
- —Source exports from your franchisor's operating system and your accounting software.
1.4 Payment processing data (Stripe Connect)
When a Franchisee enables payment collection, we facilitate transactions through Stripe Connect Standard accounts. We receive:
- —Connected Stripe account IDs (
acct_*) and onboarding status. - —Charge, payment intent, checkout session, and invoice object IDs.
- —Payment method tokens (never raw card numbers — those remain with Stripe).
- —Payout, balance transaction, refund, and dispute event records.
1.5 Bank payment data
When an End Customer pays by bank account (ACH), the account details are collected and verified by Stripe on its hosted payment pages. Route Balance stores only the tokenized payment method reference (Stripe payment method ID); we do not collect the account or routing numbers for these payments.
1.6 Identity verification data
When a Franchisee starts an identity session for an End Customer, Stripe Identity collects the document and, where applicable, a selfie for liveness matching. Route Balance stores a pass or fail — not a credit file and not a stored license dossier. See Section 4 (Biometric Information) below.
1.7 Generated activity data
Collections logs, dispute notes, audit entries, briefing acknowledgments, and other actions taken inside the Route Balance application.
1.8 Service operation data
Server logs (IP address, request method, URL, timestamp, response code), feature usage per tenant, authentication tokens, session identifiers, error and diagnostic data.
1.9 Contact inquiries
If you fill out our contact form, we collect your name, email, company, and message.
1.10 What we do NOT collect
- —Raw payment card numbers, CVV, or full account credentials from End Customer payments (held by Stripe, PCI-DSS compliant).
- —Raw bank routing or account numbers for End Customer payments (collected and held by Stripe).
- —Identity document images (held by Stripe Identity; we receive pass/fail signal and metadata only).
- —Data from children under 13.
2. How We Use Your Data
| Purpose | Legal basis (GDPR) |
|---|---|
| Operate your Franchisee account and provide the Route Balance service. | Performance of contract |
| Generate a daily morning briefing summarizing your route performance (anomaly detection on your own activity). | Performance of contract |
| Reconcile Stripe payments against your accounts receivable. | Performance of contract |
| Sync your bookkeeping to your QuickBooks Online file (with your explicit OAuth consent). | Performance of contract |
| Send End Customer payment links by email (AWS SES) or copy-link on your instruction. For pilot Franchisees, we text End Customers only to reply to texts they send first and to send sign-in and signing codes. Where a Franchisee has customer texting turned on, we also text End Customers payment links, account and intake invitations, and payment notices on that Franchisee's behalf. | Performance of contract |
| Run a Franchisee text line, if the Franchisee sets one up: receive and store texts customers send to the Franchisee's number, send automated replies when replies are switched on, and copy each exchange, with the texter's phone number, to the Franchisee's Slack. | Performance of contract |
| Post briefings, alerts, crew posts, and posts made from emails the Franchisee forwards to us into the Slack workspace the Franchisee connects, and briefings into our internal operations channel. | Performance of contract |
| Detect anomalies, broken promises, and past-due patterns in your route data. | Legitimate interest |
| Process credit decisions and identity verification for your End Customers. | Performance of contract |
| Service improvement using per-tenant feature usage and error diagnosis. | Legitimate interest |
| Security monitoring and fraud prevention. | Legitimate interest |
| Legal and regulatory compliance (including GLBA, FCRA, BIPA, NACHA, and state data broker laws where applicable). | Legal obligation |
2.1 What we do NOT do with your data
- —We do not sell or share Personal Information for cross-context behavioral advertising (CPRA definition).
- —We do not transfer your data to data brokers.
- —We do not share your data with your franchisor, equipment suppliers, or any other third party for their business purposes.
- —We do not use one Franchisee's data to inform another Franchisee's briefings, reports, or models.
- —We do not train machine-learning models on Franchisee or End Customer data.
- —Card and bank account numbers from End Customer payments stay with Stripe and are never sent to AI providers. See Section 6 for what we do send.
3. Cross-Tenant Isolation
Route Balance is single-tenant by design. One Franchisee’s data is never visible to another Franchisee. Tenant isolation is enforced by row-level security policies in our Postgres database, by signed authentication tokens, and by audited support access controls.
Where Route Balance computes aggregate, fully de-identified product metrics (e.g., total active accounts, anonymized feature usage rates), no individual Franchisee or End Customer is identifiable in those metrics.
4. Biometric Information (BIPA Notice)
This Section applies to End Customers in Illinois and to Franchisees who operate routes in Illinois.
What is collected. When you complete identity verification, Stripe Identity captures a selfie image and may generate a biometric template for liveness matching against your government-issued ID photo. Route Balance does not directly collect, store, or possess the biometric template — it is generated and held by Stripe Identity under their privacy policy.
Purpose. Identity verification for fraud prevention and credit decisioning. We do not use biometric information for advertising, profiling, or any other purpose.
Retention. Biometric data is retained by Stripe Identity for the retention period specified in Stripe Identity's Data Processing Agreement (see stripe.com/legal/identity-privacy), after which it is permanently destroyed.
No sale. Route Balance does not sell, lease, trade, or otherwise profit from biometric information.
Consent. Identity verification is initiated only after the End Customer accepts a standalone biometric consent disclosure presented before the IDV flow begins.
5. Financial Privacy Notice (GLBA)
Route Balance LLC qualifies as a financial institution under the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (“GLBA”) for purposes of facilitating Franchisee credit decisions, payment processing, and bookkeeping.
Information we collect about consumers (End Customers)
- —Information from credit-decision and IDV processes.
- —Information from payment and account activity.
- —Information from third parties such as Stripe and identity verification providers.
Information we share
- —With service providers under contract (see Section 6).
- —With the Franchisee who initiated the credit decision (their End Customer).
- —As required by law or to respond to lawful process.
- —Never for marketing purposes.
Right to opt out of sharing for joint marketing or with non-affiliates
Route Balance does not share nonpublic personal information with non-affiliates for joint marketing or for the non-affiliate’s own use. No opt-out is required because no such sharing occurs.
Our security commitment
We maintain administrative, technical, and physical safeguards as required by the GLBA Safeguards Rule. See Section 10.
6. What We Share — Service Providers (Sub-Processors)
We share data only with service providers necessary to operate Route Balance. Each is bound by contract to use data only on our instruction and to maintain appropriate security.
| Provider | Purpose | Data shared |
|---|---|---|
| Stripe, Inc. | Payment processing, Connect platform, identity (if used) | Account IDs, charge/invoice/payout metadata, payment method tokens. Per stripe.com/privacy. |
| Stripe Identity | Identity verification and liveness matching | End Customer name, DOB, ID image, selfie. Per vendor's privacy policy. |
| Supabase, Inc. | Database and authentication hosting | All Route Balance data, encrypted at rest. Stored in US East (N. Virginia) region. |
| Railway Corporation | Application hosting | Application traffic and compute. |
| Amazon Web Services, Inc. (SES) | Transactional email delivery, and receiving emails Franchisees forward to us | Recipient email and message body for service notifications, payment links, and daily morning briefings; forwarded emails and their attachments. Hosted in us-east-1. |
| Resend, Inc. | Backup transactional email delivery, used when our primary email service cannot deliver a message | Recipient email and message body. |
| Postmark (ActiveCampaign, LLC) | Backup transactional email delivery, and receiving emails Franchisees forward to us | Recipient email and message body; forwarded emails and their attachments. |
| Twilio, Inc. | SMS delivery, phone-number verification and signing codes, and the Franchisee text line (number provisioning, carrier registration, and texts to and from the Franchisee's customers). For pilot Franchisees, we text End Customers only to reply to texts they send first and to send sign-in and signing codes. Where a Franchisee has customer texting turned on, we also text End Customers payment links, account and intake invitations, and payment notices on that Franchisee's behalf. | Recipient phone, message body; for a text line, the Franchisee's legal name, address, EIN and contact person (carrier registration), and the texts on that line. |
| Slack Technologies, LLC | Posts to the Slack workspace a Franchisee connects, including one channel per truck, and to our internal operations channel | Briefings, alerts and crew posts, which can include customer names and balances; posts made from emails the Franchisee forwards, which can include a customer's name, balance, credit and financing decisions, quotes and orders, and order, shipment, repair and special-order updates; for a text line, copies of its texts with the texter's phone number. Briefing content, including customer names and balances, also goes to our internal operations channel, even if the Franchisee never connects Slack. |
| Mapbox, Inc. | Maps for coverage and fleet position pages, and address geocoding | Coordinates needed to draw the map; shop addresses to geocode. |
| Google LLC (Google Maps Platform) | Fallback address geocoding | Shop addresses to geocode. |
| OpenStreetMap Foundation (Nominatim) | Address geocoding | Shop addresses to geocode. The OpenStreetMap Foundation is based in the United Kingdom. |
| Anthropic, PBC (Claude) | AI-written briefings, cash forecasts, and variance explanations; the in-app Advisor, where it is turned on; support triage; reading documents you upload in the app or forward to us by email; forwarded supplier promotions and their images; and answering texts to a Franchisee text line, when replies are switched on | Prompt text, which includes End Customer names, balances, and past-due amounts, support request text, the text of documents you forward to us by email, documents you upload in the app that we cannot otherwise read, forwarded supplier promotions and their images, and text-line messages and conversation history. Before text we extract from a forwarded document is sent, we mask email addresses, numbers written in the dashed 3-2-4 format used for Social Security numbers, and any standalone run of 9 digits or 13 to 19 digits (the lengths of routing and card numbers). Other numbers printed with spaces or dashes, such as a card number written in groups, are not masked. Some files you upload in the app (for example, scanned PDFs or invoices we cannot parse) are sent whole and unmasked. Forwarded supplier promotions and their images are sent as received. |
| Intuit, Inc. (QuickBooks Online) | Bookkeeping sync (with Franchisee OAuth consent). Not silent auto-post of every collection. | Journal entries derived from connected activity, posted into your own QBO file when sync runs. |
| Amazon Web Services, Inc. (S3) | Storing emails Franchisees forward to us after Amazon SES receives them | Forwarded emails and their attachments. Stored in us-east-1. |
| Cloudflare, Inc. | Network proxy, bot protection, and web performance analytics | All traffic to and from the app, including IP address and browser data. |
| Sentry / Functional Software, Inc. | Application error monitoring | Stack traces and request metadata, scrubbed of payment data and PII before transmission. |
We update this list as our service providers change. Material changes will be communicated under Section 12.
7. Data Retention
| Data category | Retention |
|---|---|
| Active Franchisee account and operational data | While the Franchisee account is active |
| End Customer contact details (names, phone numbers, email and street addresses) | While the Franchisee account is active; deleted from our live systems within 30 days after the data export is delivered, or after a 30-day written offer of the export lapses |
| Text line messages, summaries and tool requests, including the copies we post to Slack | 24 months, then deleted automatically (sooner if the Franchisee asks us in writing to delete its data) |
| Text line opt-in and opt-out history | 5 years, so that we can show opt-outs were honored |
| Stripe token references | While Franchisee is active; revoked at termination |
| ACH authorization records | Minimum 2 years from last transaction (NACHA requirement) |
| Server logs | 90 days rolling |
| PII access audit logs | 12 months minimum |
| Database backups kept by our database provider | Our database provider keeps backups of the database on its own schedule. Data deleted from our live systems can remain in those backups until they expire, and we never restore deleted data from them. |
| Contact form submissions | 24 months from last contact, then deleted |
How deletion works
On termination, after the export step above, or on a verified erasure request, we delete the Franchisee’s data, including End Customer contact details, from our live systems within 30 days. Our database provider keeps backups of the database on its own schedule. Data deleted from our live systems can remain in those backups until they expire, and we never restore deleted data from them.
NACHA conflict notice
Where applicable state privacy law (e.g., the Texas Data Privacy and Security Act) grants a deletion right that conflicts with the 2-year NACHA retention requirement for ACH authorization records, the federal NACHA rule controls during the retention window. Records are flagged for deletion at the retention mark and purged thereafter.
8. Your Rights
8.1 GDPR (EU / EEA / UK)
- —Access (Article 15) — request a copy of your data.
- —Rectification (Article 16) — correct inaccurate data.
- —Erasure (Article 17) — delete your data from our live systems within 30 days. Our database provider keeps backups of the database on its own schedule. Data deleted from our live systems can remain in those backups until they expire, and we never restore deleted data from them.
- —Restriction (Article 18) — limit how we process your data.
- —Portability (Article 20) — receive your data in machine-readable form.
- —Objection (Article 21) — object to legitimate-interest processing.
- —Withdraw consent — where processing is based on consent.
Response time: 30 days from receipt.
8.2 CPRA (California)
- —Right to know — categories and specific pieces of Personal Information collected.
- —Right to delete — we delete your data from our live systems within 30 days. Our database provider keeps backups of the database on its own schedule. Data deleted from our live systems can remain in those backups until they expire, and we never restore deleted data from them.
- —Right to correct — request correction of inaccurate Personal Information.
- —Right to opt out of sale or sharing — Route Balance does not sell or share Personal Information; no opt-out mechanism is required.
- —Right to limit use of Sensitive Personal Information — request that use be limited to necessary service provision.
- —Right to non-discrimination — exercise CPRA rights without discrimination in service or price.
Response time: 45 days from receipt (extendable by an additional 45 days with notice).
8.3 Other US state privacy laws
Where applicable (CO, CT, VA, UT, TX, OR, MT, IA, IN, TN, FL, DE, NH, NJ, MN, MD, RI), residents have substantially similar rights. Submit requests through the contact method in Section 13 and reference your state.
8.4 How to submit a request
Email [email protected] with the subject line “Privacy Request — [your state / regulation].” Include your full name, the email address on file, and a description of your request. We may request identity verification before processing.
We will not charge a fee unless the request is manifestly unfounded or excessive.
9. Cookies and Tracking
| Cookie type | Purpose | Disable? |
|---|---|---|
| Essential (authentication) | Maintain login session; required to access the Service | No — Service unavailable without |
| Session management | UI preferences, CSRF protection | No — required for security |
| Analytics | Per-tenant feature usage tracking | None used currently |
| Marketing | Route Balance does not use marketing or cross-site tracking cookies | N/A |
10. Security
- —Encryption at rest: our database host encrypts stored data at rest. We do not add a separate layer of encryption to End Customer contact details; connection credentials such as Slack, QuickBooks and text line tokens are additionally encrypted.
- —Encryption in transit: TLS 1.2 or higher for all client and inter-service traffic.
- —Access control: Route Balance staff access PII only through an audited, role-restricted admin module. Every access is logged.
- —Quarterly audit: Access logs are reviewed quarterly for unauthorized or anomalous activity.
- —Anomaly detection: Automated monitoring on payment activity and operational events with alert escalation.
- —Incident response: In the event of a data breach, affected Franchisees will be notified within 72 hours.
- —PCI scope: PAN data is collected exclusively on Stripe-hosted pages; Route Balance is eligible for SAQ-A.
No system is 100% secure. If you believe your account has been compromised, contact us immediately.
11. International Data Transfers
Personal Data is stored in the United States (Supabase US East / N. Virginia; AWS, United States regions). If Personal Data is transferred from the EEA or UK to the United States, Route Balance relies on Standard Contractual Clauses (SCCs) approved by the European Commission, or other appropriate transfer mechanisms under GDPR Chapter V.
12. Changes to This Policy
We may update this Privacy Policy. Material changes will be communicated by email or in-app notice at least 30 days before they take effect. Continued use of Route Balance after the effective date constitutes acceptance.
13. Contact
Privacy Contact: Route Balance LLC
Email: [email protected]
Mailing address: Route Balance LLC, 1311 Commerce Lane, Suite 4, Jupiter, FL 33458
GDPR Supervisory Authority: EU/EEA residents may lodge a complaint with their local data protection authority.
California Privacy Protection Agency: California residents may contact CPPA at cppa.ca.gov.