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Workforce, data retention and white label settings

Three Settings screens not covered elsewhere. Workforce holds the departments, job titles and grades your employee records choose from. Data Retention decides how long photos attached to form submissions are kept at full quality, shrunk, and deleted. White Label, on the Enterprise plan, puts your name and logo on the app and on form submission PDFs. Each says who can change it, and what it does not do yet.

Who can change these?

Screen Who
Settings → Workforce Admin, Manager
Settings → Data Retention Admin
Settings → White Label Admin, on the Professional plan

The company details on Settings → General are covered in Account setup.

What is on Workforce?

Workforce — Manage grades, departments & job titles. These are the lists the employee form offers when you add or edit someone; see Manage employees.

Settings → Workforce. A collapsed Platform Role Types card — Canonical SIA licence categories, used for marketplace matching — shows 12 types. Departments, with Add Department, lists MG Manned Guarding — Static guarding at client sites. Job Titles, with Add Job Title, lists Gatehouse Officer, Relief Officer, Retail Security Officer, Security Officer and Site Supervisor. Employee Grades, with Add Grade, lists DS Door Supervisor and SG Security Guard. Each row has an edit and a delete button.

Section Each entry has
Departments A Code and Name, both required, and a Description
Job Titles A Title, required, and a Description
Employee Grades A Code and Name, both required, a Description, an optional Role Type, and optional Required Certifications

Platform Role Types opens to list the SIA licence categories ShiftTracker uses everywhere — These are platform-defined and cannot be edited. Linking a grade to one of them, under Role Type, says which licence that grade holds. None (custom grade) leaves it unlinked.

How do I add, change or remove an entry?

  1. Press Add Department, Add Job Title or Add Grade.
  2. Fill the fields and save. A code or title already in use in that list is refused.
  3. To change one, press its edit button. To remove one, press its bin button, then Delete.

Removing works differently in each list:

List What delete does
Departments, Job Titles The entry disappears from the list and is no longer offered, but is kept behind the scenes — records that already use it keep it. It cannot be brought back; add a new one with the same code or title instead
Employee Grades The grade is deleted outright. A grade any employee still has is refused — Employees still hold this grade. Move them to another grade first.

What does Data Retention do?

It sets how long photos attached to form submissions are kept, and in what form. It does not touch employee or officer documents, check-call records, or anything else.

Settings → Data Retention on its defaults. How lifecycle management works: photos move through four stages — hot (recent, full quality), warm (downsampled), cold (archived), purged (deleted). Lifecycle Stage Transitions: Hot → Warm (days) 90, How long photos stay at full quality; Warm → Cold (days) 730, Total days before archiving; Cold → Purge (days) empty, reading Never, Leave empty to never auto-purge; and a line reading Total retention: 820 + indefinitely days. Evidence Photos has three choices, with Never downsample evidence photos selected, then Downsample after 30 days and Downsample after 90 days. Organization Deactivation has Grace period (days) 90. Save Changes and Reset to Defaults buttons sit at the bottom.

A background job runs every six hours and moves each photo on according to its age — counted from when the form was submitted:

Setting Default After that many days
Hot → Warm (days) 90 The full-quality original is deleted; a smaller copy is kept
Warm → Cold (days) 730 The smaller copy is deleted too. Only the thumbnail is left
Cold → Purge (days) empty — never The thumbnail is deleted too

All three are ages since submission, not added together. The Total retention line under them adds the first two, so it overstates how long photos are kept.

The screen calls the cold stage archived, but no archive copy is kept: once a photo reaches Warm → Cold, the picture itself is gone, even with Cold → Purge left at never. If you need photos kept at full size for longer, raise Hot → Warm and Warm → Cold, or keep evidence photos on Never downsample evidence photos.

Evidence Photos covers photos a form stores as evidence:

  • Never downsample evidence photos — the default — keeps them at full quality. They are never archived or deleted, whatever the stages above say.
  • Downsample after 30 days and Downsample after 90 days both make evidence photos follow the same stages as any other photo. The 30 and 90 are not used.

Organization Deactivation sets a grace period before a deactivated organisation's photos are deleted. Nothing in ShiftTracker deactivates an organisation today, so this setting has no effect yet.

The banner mentions litigation holds, which pause the stages for a photo. A photo on hold is marked Hold on its submission, but there is no button to place or lift a hold.

To change the settings, edit them and press Save Changes. Reset to Defaults puts the boxes back to the defaults; press Save Changes to keep that.

How long are check-call records kept?

Data Retention does not cover the check-call log: the check calls, book-ons and book-offs listed in a shift's check-call timeline. They are evidence of hours worked, which an employer must be able to show for six years (minimum wage, holiday pay and contract claims), so they are kept for 74 months — six years and two months — in every organisation, and then deleted. The GPS position recorded with each one is removed after 3 years, except on an emergency; the distance from the site and whether it was inside the geofence are kept for the whole 74 months.

A shift's own start and finish times, and its pay, are not affected. The check-call report and the compliance warrant cannot cover a period whose log has been deleted. None of this can be changed in Settings.

What does White Label change?

Without Professional, Settings → White Label shows Branding is a Professional feature and a Switch to Professional button, which opens Settings → Subscription. An organisation still on a previous price list keeps the branding it had until its account moves to the new one.

On Professional, it holds:

Field Where it shows
Application Name The app header, and form submission PDFs
Organization Logo — JPEG, PNG, WebP or SVG, up to 5 MB The app header, and the PDF letterhead
Header Display — Logo & Name, Logo only or Name only The app header, and the PDF letterhead. Logo only needs a logo
Primary Color, Secondary Color, Company Name Form submission PDFs
Support Email, Support Phone, Terms of Service URL, Privacy Policy URL, Footer Text Form submission PDFs

The colours do not restyle the app. Press Save App Settings; the header changes after you reload the page.

Last updated 2026-10-12