SECURITY, PRIVACY & GDPR

Boring, in the way security should be.

You are putting your guest database, your staff files and your pay figures into this. So the interesting questions are who can reach them, whether that is actually enforced, and what happens when someone asks you to delete them.

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No security tier. The controls are the same on one site as on fifty.
ACCESS

Every check happens on the server.

A permission that only hides a button is a suggestion. The grid that decides what a role can do is applied to every read and every write, which is what makes it safe to give a supervisor an account at all.

Per-action permissions, per role

Not a handful of tiers. Every feature is a Yes or No per action per role, and the grid is the only wall: nothing is granted by seniority alone.

Enforced where it counts

Checked on the server on every read and write, not hidden in the interface and hoped for.

Permissions from the org chart

Set once per role, not per person. A promotion changes what someone can see because it changed their role, not because someone remembered to update them.

Sensitive things default to No

Pay visibility and labour cost are off until explicitly granted, including for managers.

Two-factor authentication

Email two-factor for management accounts, with trusted devices, and roles that can be marked as requiring it.

Forced password change

Temporary passwords issued on a reset or a new account must be changed at first sign-in.
ACCOUNTABILITY

Who did that, and when.

Most disputes in a pub are not about malice. They are about nobody being able to say what happened. An audit trail is worth more than another approval step.

Audited sensitive actions

The trail covers the actions that matter: permission changes, staff record edits, deletions and reveals.

A credential vault that logs every look

Shared logins live in a head-office vault instead of a note behind the bar, and every reveal records who looked and when.

Change history where it is contested

Rota edits, contract versions and compliance corrections keep their history, and a corrected record supersedes rather than overwrites.
DATA PROTECTION

GDPR as a feature, not a policy document.

A privacy policy is a promise. What matters is whether the system can actually do the thing the promise describes on the day someone asks.

Consent tracked, not assumed

Marketing consent is recorded against the guest with the date it changed, and opted-out guests are excluded from automated sends.

Subject access export

Produce everything held about a guest without a developer and a database query.

Right to erasure, including payments

Erasure reaches the payment records held at Stripe as well as the booking history.

Retention that runs itself

Automatic retention sweeps, and staff records archived for six years then anonymised rather than kept forever by default.

Tenant isolation

One company cannot read another. Enforced server-side, not by a filter in the interface.

Private document storage

Contracts, right-to-work scans and certificates are held privately rather than on a link anyone with the URL can open.
THE PUBLIC EDGE

The parts of the system strangers can reach.

Your booking widget, feedback form and pre-order links are open to the internet by definition. They are the parts that need protecting from automation rather than from your staff.

Rate limiting

On every public endpoint, so a script cannot hammer the diary or probe availability at volume.

App attestation

Guest-facing calls carry attestation, so requests that did not come from your booking page do not get served.

Self-serve links without accounts

Amend, cancel, pre-order and starter forms work from a single-use token, so a guest or a new starter never needs an account to be created for them.

Why this matters more in hospitality than people assume

A pub holds a surprising amount of sensitive data. Guest names, phone numbers, dietary and allergy notes, card details on file for no-show fees. Staff dates of birth, National Insurance numbers, pay rates, right-to-work documents. In most pubs that data is spread across a booking system, a spreadsheet, a WhatsApp group and a folder in the office, and the honest answer to "who can see the pay file" is "whoever knows where it is".

Consolidating it into one system is only an improvement if the permissions are real. That is why the grid is per-action, why it is enforced on the server, and why pay defaults to No even for the people running the site. Fewer places for the data to be is worth a great deal, but only alongside a genuine answer to who can reach it.

The full detail is in our privacy policy and data processing agreement. If you have a security question that is not answered here, ask it on a demo: it will be answered by the person who wrote the rules.

WHAT OPERATORS ASK

Security questions.

What does "server-enforced permissions" actually mean?

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That the check happens where it cannot be bypassed. Hiding a button in the interface stops an honest person clicking it; it does not stop anyone who opens the developer tools. Every read and write in Hendra One is checked on the server against the permission grid for that role, so a hidden feature is genuinely unavailable rather than merely invisible.

Who can see staff pay and guest data?

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Only roles you have granted it to, per action. Pay visibility defaults to No, including for site managers. Guest data is scoped to the sites a person has access to. Every sensitive reveal, such as a password from the shared vault, is logged with who looked and when.

How do you handle a subject access request or a right to erasure?

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Both are built in rather than being a manual database job. There is a subject-access export for a guest, and an erasure that reaches the payment records held at Stripe as well as the booking history. Staff records are archived for six years and then anonymised, with restore available in the meantime.

Is the public booking widget protected against bots?

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Yes. Public endpoints are rate limited and carry app attestation, so an automated script cannot sit filling your diary with fake covers or harvesting availability.

Where is the data held, and is each company separated?

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Data is tenant-isolated: one company cannot read another, enforced by the same server-side rules rather than by a filter in the interface. Documents such as contracts and right-to-work scans are held in private storage, not on public links.

See it running on your own menus and your own tables.

A 30-minute walkthrough with someone who has run a service, not a sales deck.

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