Privacy Policy
Effective August 26, 2026
ShelfCount is an inventory and food-cost platform for cafés and restaurants, operated by Mentrup Group LLC, doing business as Insider Management (“we”, “us”). This policy explains what information we collect when you use ShelfCount, why we collect it, and the choices you have. The short version: we collect what the product needs to work, we don’t sell your data, and we don’t use it for advertising.
Information we collect
Account information. Your name, email address, and a password (stored only as a cryptographic hash — we never see or store the password itself).
Business information. Your organization’s name, business address, and logo if you upload one.
Operational data you enter. Inventory items, recipes, counts, storage locations, vendors, purchase orders, par levels, waste logs, and similar records you and your team create while using the product.
Point-of-sale data. If you connect a POS system (Square, Toast, or Clover), we sync your catalog and sales data using read-only access so we can calculate food costs. We store the access tokens needed to keep that connection alive, and you can disconnect at any time from your settings.
Receipts and invoices. Vendor receipts and invoices you upload, photograph, or forward to your organization’s receipt inbox, along with the text we extract from them.
Billing information. Payments are processed by Stripe. We never see or store your full card number — Stripe handles it and gives us only what we need to manage your subscription (such as the card’s last four digits and your billing status).
Log and device data. Standard server logs (IP address, browser type, pages requested) that help us keep the service secure and working.
How we use your information
- To provide the product: counts, recipe costing, purchase orders, COGS reporting, and everything else you signed up for.
- To read your receipts: we use automated text recognition and AI to extract line items from receipt images and PDFs (see the next section).
- To send transactional email: password resets, purchase orders you send to vendors, and alerts you’ve turned on.
- To respond when you contact us for support.
- To keep the service secure and prevent abuse.
We do not sell your personal information, and we do not use your data for advertising.
AI processing of receipts
When you upload a receipt, we may send its text or image to Anthropic (the company behind the Claude AI models) to extract line items — vendor, product names, quantities, and prices. This happens under commercial API terms that prohibit Anthropic from training its models on your data. Extracted results are always presented for your review before anything is saved to your inventory; nothing is committed automatically.
Analytics and product usage
We use two analytics processors to understand how ShelfCount is used and to fix confusing or broken parts of the product:
- Microsoft Clarity, on our marketing website only (the pages you see before signing in) — heatmaps, scroll depth, and session replay of anonymized browsing behavior, so we can see which parts of the site people actually use.
- PostHog, inside the signed-in product only — usage analytics (which screens and features get used) and session replay of your in-app activity, used mainly during your first setup and trial to see where the onboarding steps are confusing.
Session replay from both tools is masked by default: text on the screen and anything you type is hidden from the recording unless it’s part of our own app’s structural chrome (menus, buttons, headings). We never unmask table data — item names, costs, vendor details, or staff emails stay hidden — and neither tool captures keystrokes as you type. Demo accounts and our own internal platform-admin account are excluded from both tools entirely.
Analytics data is kept only as long as it’s useful for this purpose, under each processor’s own retention settings, and is deleted sooner on request — see “Your rights” below for how to ask.
Who we share data with
We share data only with the service providers that run the product, and only what each needs to do its job:
- Hetzner Online GmbH — cloud hosting for the application and database.
- Stripe — subscription billing.
- Anthropic — receipt line extraction, as described above.
- Google Workspace — sending transactional email.
- Square, Toast, or Clover — only if you connect them, and only to pull your own data into ShelfCount.
- Microsoft Clarity and PostHog — product analytics and session replay, as described above.
We may also disclose information if the law requires it, or to protect the rights and safety of our users and business.
Data retention
We keep your data while your account is active. If your subscription lapses or you cancel, your account is paused and your data stays put for 12 months from the date of cancellation — resubscribe in that window and everything is right where you left it. After 12 months we permanently delete your data, and we’ll email you before that happens. If you want your data deleted sooner, email us and we’ll remove it, including from backups as they cycle out (our backups are kept on a rolling schedule off the main server).
Security
All traffic to ShelfCount is encrypted in transit (HTTPS). Passwords are hashed, POS access is limited to read-only scopes where the provider offers them, and access within your organization is controlled by the roles you assign your team.
Your rights
You can access and update most of your data directly in the product. You can also email us to request a copy of your data or ask us to delete it.
If you’re a California resident, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) gives you the right to know what personal information we collect, to request its deletion, and to not be discriminated against for exercising those rights. We don’t sell personal information, so there’s nothing to opt out of. To exercise any of these rights, email us at the address below.
Cookies
We use a cookie to keep you signed in, and Microsoft Clarity and PostHog each set a first-party cookie on the pages they run on so a session’s pageviews can be grouped together. There are no advertising or cross-site tracking cookies.
Children
ShelfCount is a business tool and isn’t directed at children. We don’t knowingly collect information from anyone under 16.
Changes to this policy
If we make meaningful changes to this policy, we’ll update the effective date above and, for significant changes, notify you by email or in the product.
Contact
Questions about this policy or your data? Email hello@insidermanagement.net and a human will get back to you.