Ballast | Planning

Privacy Policy

1. WHO WE ARE

Ballast Planning LLC ("Ballast," "we," "us," or "our") provides professional reserve-planning services and related customer tools. This Privacy Policy explains how we handle information in connection with our website, customer workspace, Ballast Vault, professional services, issued work product, Ballast Board, and Live Reserve Service. Ballast can be contacted at

info@ballastplanning.com.

Summary:

Ballast collects information a visitor supplies and limited technical and first-party measurement information needed to operate, secure, and understand its services. Ballast does not sell personal information, share personal information with advertisers, or use behavioral or cross-site advertising. Ballast uses strictly necessary continuation and authentication cookies when those functions are used. For eligible United States requests, Ballast may also use one first-party pseudonymous measurement-journey cookie as described below.

2. SCOPE

This Policy applies to information Ballast handles through its websites, complimentary tools, customer accounts and workspaces, professional engagements, issued deliverables, and related communications. It does not replace the terms of an accepted Order Summary or the Service Terms. Third-party services have their own privacy practices for information they receive directly.

3. INFORMATION WE HANDLE

Customer and engagement information:

We handle information supplied by a client, its representatives, managers, advisers, or other authorized participants. This may include association and property details, contact information, governance and reserve-planning information, budgets, prior studies, component information, condition observations, project scope, onboarding responses, walkthrough submissions, communications, and other information needed for the selected service.

Uploaded documents and source materials:

The Ballast Vault and related upload features may receive reserve studies, budgets, financial or operational records, photographs, invoices, proposals, component information, walkthrough materials, and other documents supplied for an engagement. Uploading information does not make it a professional fact. Customer-submitted information remains customer information until Ballast reviews and accepts, rejects, qualifies, or requests clarification about it.

Issued work product and professional records:

We maintain issued studies, standing or reliance records, issued-document files, exact document hashes, dated baselines, ruleset references, source and reviewer lineage, and related service history needed to show what Ballast issued and the basis for it. Drafts, work in progress, unreviewed extraction, and preliminary calculations are maintained separately from issued professional work.

Account, authentication, and access information:

We handle account identifiers, email addresses, authentication and session information, project memberships, roles, access grants, sign-in and callback outcomes, and security or access events. Authentication is used to connect a person to authorized projects and to prevent cross-project access.

Commercial and payment information:

We handle quotes, accepted scope, product, price, currency, billing cadence, contract term, acceptance records, payment and subscription status, processor identifiers, event lineage, paid-through and grace status, and entitlement information. Payment credentials are collected and processed by our payment provider. Ballast does not store raw card numbers, bank-account credentials, or raw payment credentials.

Lender Standing Letter requests:

When a lender or other requester enters a report reference code to request a Lender Standing Letter, we handle the requester's name, organization, email address, and payment information. Payment credentials are collected and processed by our payment provider. We use this information to verify the request, issue the letter, process the fee, and keep a record of the letter. Because the association authorized it by sharing the reference code, we disclose the report's standing information to the person who presents the code.

Website, analytics, and operational information:

We may receive standard request and device information such as IP address, browser or device type, requested pages, timestamps, referring information, and security signals. Our complimentary tools may record coarse, non-identifying usage events and may create a temporary reference that stores only limited property facts for form prefill. We also maintain operational receipts and error information needed to secure, diagnose, and operate the service. Launch receipts are designed not to log raw email addresses, names, roles, form bodies, tokens, keys, or document contents.

De-identified and aggregated information:

We may derive de-identified and aggregated information from engagements to improve internal methods, quality controls, statistics, and models, including replacement-cost intelligence. Ballast will not identify the client or property in published output or redistribute client documents without permission. This may include publishing de-identified, aggregated cost information in an openly licensed replacement-cost index. Published cost information never identifies a client, a property, or a contractor's individual bid.

4. HOW WE USE INFORMATION

We use information to provide and administer requested tools and professional services; authenticate users and enforce project membership; create, review, issue, preserve, and reproduce professional work; communicate about an engagement; form and administer accepted commercial arrangements; process and reconcile payments through the payment provider; provide post-issuance and Live access; protect the service and investigate misuse or incidents; diagnose failures and maintain operational records; comply with legal, tax, insurance, professional, and recordkeeping obligations; and improve Ballast services using information as permitted by the Service Terms and this Policy.

Ballast does not sell personal information and does not use customer information for behavioral advertising.

5. AUTOMATED SYSTEMS AND PROFESSIONAL REVIEW

Ballast may use software, automated extraction and classification, calculations, comparisons, and artificial intelligence to assist its work. Customer uploads and automated proposals do not by themselves change a professional record, Current Position, or an issued deliverable. Paid professional work is reviewed before formal issuance. The Standing Check is an informational screening tool and is not a credit decision, financing decision, or guarantee.

6. WHEN WE DISCLOSE INFORMATION

We disclose information as reasonably necessary to service providers that support hosting and delivery, authentication, database and private storage, payment processing, email delivery, security, error monitoring, analytics, document generation, and related operations. These providers process information under their own service and privacy terms and according to the services Ballast configures.

We may also disclose information to authorized client representatives and service participants; a management firm or adviser acting for the client; professional advisers, insurers, auditors, or financing parties where appropriate; government authorities or other parties when required by law or reasonably necessary to protect rights, safety, systems, or evidence; and a successor in a merger, financing, reorganization, or sale of relevant assets, subject to applicable obligations.

Sharing an issued deliverable does not itself create a third-party reliance right. The Service Terms and any specific reliance letter govern permitted reliance.

Service providers:

Ballast uses service providers to host the application, database, storage, authentication, payment, email, error monitoring, and approved public-site analytics. Vercel Analytics receives only the bounded analytics described above; the Ballast measurement-journey key is not sent to Vercel Analytics. Service providers may process information only for the services Ballast asks them to perform and subject to their applicable contractual and legal obligations.

7. COOKIES AND SIMILAR TECHNOLOGIES

Automatically collected information and measurement:

Ballast uses limited first-party attribution and Vercel Analytics to understand how approved public pages and supported customer journeys perform. Ballast may record the public-page pathname where a visit or action occurred, the referring host, Ballast source, channel, and referral labels, and the standard UTM source, medium, campaign, content, and term supplied in the visitor's link. Each value is bounded.

Ballast does not use the raw query string, URL fragment, referring-page path, advertising click identifiers, names, email addresses, association names, Standing Check answers, uploaded-document content, or access or continuation tokens as measurement attribution. Public analytics page-view URLs omit query strings and fragments. Private and unrecognized page views are withheld. Supported customer interaction events use route templates instead of customer identifiers or bearer values.

Persistent measurement journey:

For requests that Ballast's hosting provider labels exactly as originating in the United States, Ballast may set one first-party pseudonymous measurement-journey cookie. The cookie contains a random value that does not encode a name, email address, association, property, campaign, location, timestamp, authentication right, or access right. It is HttpOnly, SameSite=Lax, Secure in production, lasts no more than 30 days from first issue, and does not renew.

If the United States signal is missing, malformed, or indicates another country, Ballast does not set or use the journey cookie and expires any presented journey cookie. Ballast uses the country signal only for that eligibility decision and does not store it in the journey record.

The United States limitation applies to the persistent journey cookie and journey linkage. Ballast may still record bounded entry attribution and aggregate page or funnel events without a persistent journey identifier for visitors elsewhere.

Journey record and later linkage:

When a journey is first created, Ballast stores the random key, the first-seen time, and the bounded first-touch attribution once. If the visitor later submits a Study Check or a scope request, Ballast may link that journey to the resulting submission or request and use the canonical service and commercial records to count later completion, staff review, quote, acceptance, and paid-engagement outcomes.

Ballast does not link the journey to an anonymous Standing Check event, and the journey key is not sent to Vercel Analytics. The journey key is not authentication and grants no access.

Standing Check boundary:

An anonymous Standing Check records a coarse result event and bounded attribution used for aggregate measurement. Ballast does not store Standing Check answers or identity in that anonymous event and does not join the measurement-journey key to it. If a visitor separately asks Ballast to retain or deliver a result, submits a Study Check, requests scope, or enters an engagement, the records required for that requested service are governed by the applicable service and retention provisions.

Cookies and similar storage:

Ballast uses the following first-party storage only when the relevant function is used:

a. Study Check continuation. A short-lived, single-use, HttpOnly cookie carries an accepted Study Check into a scope request. It is not advertising, measurement, or authentication and expires or is refused after its bounded claim period. b. Measurement journey. The pseudonymous cookie described above is HttpOnly, SameSite=Lax, Secure in production, fixed at no more than 30 days from first issue, and never renewed. c. Authentication session. Ballast's authentication provider may use one or more provider-managed session cookies for sign-in and protected access. These are used for authentication, not acquisition measurement or advertising.

Ballast does not promise an exact physical cookie count because provider-managed sessions may be chunked or changed by the authentication provider. Ballast does not claim that every authentication cookie is HttpOnly. Ballast does not use third-party advertising cookies or cross-site behavioral tracking cookies.

8. RETENTION, ACCESS WINDOWS, AND DELETION

We retain information for as long as reasonably necessary for the purpose for which it was collected and for the professional, contractual, legal, tax, insurance, security, dispute, and recordkeeping needs described in this Policy and the Service Terms. Retention depends on the record category and the status of the engagement; Ballast does not promise that all categories follow one fixed deletion date.

Issued work product, acceptance records, payment and service events, source and reviewer lineage, immutable upload receipts, and supporting records may be retained as durable or append-only evidence. Ballast will not silently rewrite an issued study or its lineage. Closing an account or ending customer-facing access does not necessarily delete those records.

For a one-time Full Reserve Study or Reserve Study Update, portal access is generally available for 30 days after issuance unless the accepted Order states otherwise. After Live ends, the client receives 12 months of document-only access; after the stated sunset date, the customer-facing environment may close. These access windows describe customer access, not deletion of Ballast records.

A temporary reference created by a complimentary tool may become unusable after its configured expiry period even if its underlying row has not yet been removed. When Ballast honors a deletion request, deletion from active systems may not immediately remove information that must be retained or that remains in protected backups, security records, or provider systems for their operational cycles.

Retention:

The measurement-journey cookie expires after 30 days. Under the current implementation, server-side journey and touchpoint records already created are append-only and are not deleted when the browser cookie expires. Cookie expiry prevents future use of that key; it does not erase prior records. The ordinary retention rules for Study Check submissions, scope requests, commercial records, issued determinations, reports, billing records, and customer-provided documents apply independently.

9. SECURITY

Ballast uses administrative and technical measures appropriate to the service, including authenticated access, project-membership checks, private document storage, row-level access controls, restricted service-role operations, integrity hashes, and encrypted transport. Access and mutation rules are designed to separate customer submission, professional admission, commercial state, payment verification, and issuance. No security measure or transmission method is perfect, and Ballast cannot guarantee absolute security.

Users should protect access to their email account and devices, use only authorized links, and promptly tell Ballast about suspected unauthorized access.

10. YOUR CHOICES AND RIGHTS

You may contact Ballast to request access to, correction of, or a copy of personal information associated with you; request account closure or deletion; update contact information; or object to or restrict certain processing where applicable law provides that right. Ballast may need to verify your identity and authority to act for the client before responding.

Some requests may be limited where Ballast must preserve an issued professional record, accepted commercial record, payment or tax record, security evidence, legal hold, dispute record, or other information required for legitimate legal or professional purposes. Where deletion is not available, Ballast may be able to restrict active use or separate contact information from ongoing communications. Ballast will respond as required by applicable law and will not discriminate for exercising an applicable privacy right.

To make a request, email info@ballastplanning.com with enough information for Ballast to understand and verify the request. Do not send sensitive credentials or full payment information by email.

11. COMMUNICATIONS

Ballast may send transactional and operational messages about authentication, an engagement, required information, payment status, issuance, access, or security. Marketing communications, if offered, will include the choices required by applicable law. Opting out of marketing does not stop necessary service or security messages.

12. CHILDREN

Ballast services are intended for adults acting for associations and related professional or business participants. Ballast does not knowingly solicit personal information from children. If you believe a child supplied personal information, contact Ballast so the matter can be reviewed.

13. PROCESSING LOCATIONS

Ballast and its service providers may process information in the United States and in other locations where they operate. Privacy and data-protection rules may differ by location. Ballast applies this Policy to information within its control regardless of processing location, subject to applicable law and provider terms.

14. CHANGES TO THIS POLICY

Ballast may update this Policy prospectively. An operative policy will identify its version and effective date. When required, Ballast will provide notice or obtain a new acceptance or acknowledgment. An update will not silently rewrite the version and hash pinned to an existing accepted Order or issued record.

15. DISPUTES

If you are a paying Ballast client, a dispute about how Ballast handles your information is resolved under Section 19 of the Service Terms, which provides for informal resolution first, then individual arbitration, with a 30-day opt-out. If you use our website or complimentary tools without a paid engagement, Section 15 of the Terms of Use applies. Utah law governs.

16. CONTACT

Questions or privacy requests: info@ballastplanning.com. Ballast Planning LLC, Utah, United States.