Plain rules, written to be read.

These terms are a contract between you and NDT LLC, a Nevada limited liability company, 304 S. Jones Blvd # 6256, Las Vegas, NV 89107, which operates TRACE ("TRACE," "we," "us"), governing your use of the TRACE application at tracendt.com. By creating an account or using the service, you agree to them. If you're accepting on behalf of a company, you're confirming you have the authority to bind that company.

TRACE is a record-keeping and tracking tool for NDT compliance programs: technician certifications, compliance items, documents, expiration dates, and related workflows. It organizes the information you put into it and surfaces dates and statuses based on that information.

Optional modules extend that same record-keeping to adjacent parts of the business — accreditation audits, examinations, equipment calibration, safety and radiation records, personnel records in People, quality-system records, training — including online courses a firm may also offer for sale to people outside it — projects, estimating and client relationships, and invoicing. Each is record-keeping in its own domain. Section 3 applies to all of them equally: holding a record in TRACE is not the same as satisfying whatever obligation the record exists to evidence.

Some features come with the plan itself. Code Watch and Task Boards come with the Free, Plus, Pro and Enterprise plans, though not with an account that has bought a single module on its own; AI Assist comes with every plan. Code Watch checks, on a weekly schedule, the public listings of the codes and standards on a watch list TRACE maintains, and tells you when a newer revision appears than the one on file. Task Boards lay your team's work out as lists and cards. AI Assist drafts work for your staff to check: it reads a technician's document packet and extracts their details, certifications and the requirements behind them; pre-assesses an audit checklist you have imported against a client's own procedures; answers questions about your own records; and writes a short summary of a single document. If you use Certification Testing, it can also draft test questions from a document your firm holds, for an examiner to approve, edit or delete, suggest a mark for a candidate's essay answer, which the examiner still decides and enters, and draft a translation of a test's questions into another language, which stays a draft until someone at your firm who reads that language approves it. If you use the QMS module, it can suggest a root cause, containment and corrective action for a finding, which your staff copy into the finding or ignore. It can also read one of your firm's own blank form documents — a Word original, or a scan of the paper sheet — and lay out the matching TRACE form from it, as an unsaved draft your staff read and save themselves. And when your firm prints its reports on its own paper form and the blank it uploads is a scan, it can read the scan to propose where each value goes and to say whether anything is already written in, as a proposal your staff check and save themselves. The in-app help chat answers questions about using TRACE from TRACE's own help content. Section 14 says what AI Assist sends to our AI provider, and how your consultancy can turn it off.

TRACE also records who did what: which named person holds a company's appointments, who signed a certification, who administered an examination, and who changed a record. Each name on a sign-off says how it got there: signed by that person with their own TRACE login; signed through a signing link emailed to them and confirmed with a code sent to that address (section 5); recorded by someone at your firm from a signed paper document, which is attached to the record; or simply entered by your firm as who did the work, which says who entered it. Sign-offs entered by a firm before October 2026 say that instead. Where it can check such a claim against the data you have given it — that an examiner is qualified in the method and is not examining themselves or their senior — it does, and it will refuse the entry if the check fails. That is a consistency check on your own records, not an independent verification of anyone's qualifications, and it does not transfer any part of the responsibility for those appointments or those signatures away from the people who hold them.

TRACE is not a substitute for your own compliance obligations, professional judgment, or quality program. You — not TRACE — remain solely responsible for meeting the requirements of the standards, customers, and auditors that govern your business, including verifying that the dates, records, and statuses in TRACE are accurate and complete.

Reminders, digests, and dashboards are conveniences calculated from the data you entered. They are not professional advice, and they do not guarantee that nothing is expired, missed, or non-compliant. An empty dashboard means TRACE has no record of a problem — not that no problem exists.

TRACE is not an HR, payroll, or employment-law service. It does not file any form with any agency, does not verify anyone's identity or eligibility to work, and does not make you compliant with any employment, identity-verification, or privacy law. It keeps the records you choose to keep.

The same applies to safety and regulatory records. Storing safety trainings, dosimetry results, audit records, or source leak tests in TRACE does not make you compliant with OSHA regulations, radioactive materials license conditions, or any contractor-qualification program, and does not itself satisfy any regulatory retention requirement. Responsibilities assigned by a license — including those of a named Radiation Safety Officer — remain with the people the license assigns them to. TRACE is not affiliated with ISNetworld, Avetta, Veriforce, or any similar platform, and does not submit anything to them on your behalf.

AI output is a draft. What AI Assist produces — an extraction from a packet, an answer, a checklist pre-assessment, a document summary, a drafted test question, a suggested essay mark, a drafted translation, a suggested root cause, a form drafted from one of your own documents, a reading of a scanned certificate or form, a second opinion on how an imported file should be sorted, a self-audit cross-check verdict, a help-chat reply — can be wrong or incomplete, even when it quotes its source. A qualified person at your firm must check it before it is relied on, accepted into a record, or passed to anyone else. Extractions and pre-assessments wait for one of your staff to accept them; drafted questions and translations stay drafts until someone at your firm approves them — a translation by someone who reads the language, since a mistranslated question is a wrong question — a suggested mark is only shown to the examiner, who enters the grade, and a suggested root cause is only shown on the finding form until someone copies it in and saves; a form drafted from one of your documents is nothing but an unsaved sheet in the editor until one of your staff reads it and saves it, so no model puts a revision on your register; a document summary is saved onto the document when someone asks for it, and should be read as a draft like the rest. A self-audit cross-check verdict is shown beside the line it is about in the review, and becomes a finding only if one of your staff drafts and saves one. No certification, qualification or audit decision is made by it.

Code Watch alerts are informational. They are based on what publishers and resellers list publicly, checked on a schedule, so an alert can be late or missing if a listing is late, wrong or unreachable; a check that fails is reported as failed rather than guessed. The publisher's own listing governs which revision is current, and obtaining the standard itself is still a purchase from the publisher.

The same goes for invoicing. The year-end 1099 report adds up what your records say you paid the vendors you marked, against the reporting threshold as we understand it for that year; it is not tax advice, it decides nothing about who must receive a 1099, and TRACE files nothing with the IRS or anyone else. Late fees, retainage, ageing and statements are calculated from the invoices, payments and settings you enter. Whether a late fee may be charged, and at what rate, depends on your contracts and the law where you and your client do business — turning late fees on is your firm's decision, and making sure they are lawful and agreed is your firm's responsibility.

The same goes for FAA mechanic certificates. Where TRACE shows whether a mechanic's A&P recent experience is current, or when an Inspection Authorization's next activity or renewal falls due, that is worked out from the dates your firm entered and from 14 CFR part 65 as we read it. It is not a determination by the FAA or by us, and it can be wrong if a date is missing or wrong, or if the rules change. Whether a mechanic may exercise a certificate or an Inspection Authorization is for the mechanic, your firm and the FAA to decide.

Task Boards are a work-tracking tool. A card, checklist or due date on a board is a reminder for your team, not a compliance record, unless your own quality system chooses to treat it as one.

Keep your login credentials confidential — you're responsible for activity under your account. Two-factor authentication is required on consultancy staff accounts and on client-portal logins — an authenticator app, a one-time code emailed for each sign-in, or a passkey, which stands on its own — and available to every other account, where we recommend turning it on. A consultancy can also require it of its technicians. TRACE's read-only demo workspace is the exception, in two ways that are not quite the same. The second step is not asked while the workspace you are working in is the demo, which lasts only as long as you are in it: switch back to your own firm and it is required again before your records will open. And a login that belongs to the demo and to no real firm goes further than an exception — because that workspace is shared, an authenticator set up on such a login would lock out everyone else using it, and a passkey would leave one visitor a way in of their own, so TRACE refuses both there. That is the shared login we publish and any account that has only ever been let into the demo; join a real firm and both become available. Every other account can add one. Narrower again, the demo workspace's own shared logins — the one we publish and the demo client and technician logins beside it — cannot change or reset their password, because every visitor signs in with them and a new password would lock out the next person and the tablet we take to trade stands. A login of your own that was let into the demo keeps its own password.

Provide accurate account information, and keep it current. Accounts are for your business's use; don't share logins between people — invite additional users instead.

Calendar subscription links work like a password for that calendar. If you subscribe to your TRACE schedule or your firm's compliance calendar from another calendar app, anyone who has the link can read the calendar's entries without signing in — what is due or scheduled, and when, which can name client companies, jobs and their sites — so keep it to yourself, and regenerate or turn off the link from your Account page if it may have been shared. Your calendar app collects the entries from TRACE itself and holds them under its own provider's terms.

The data you put into TRACE is yours. We claim no ownership of it, and we use it only to operate the service, as described in our Privacy Policy.

You're responsible for having the right to store the data you enter — for example, that you may lawfully keep records about your technicians and clients.

That responsibility extends to information other people give you through TRACE. If you switch on your lead form, use a deal's reply address, or give out a board's email address, what a prospect submits or emails arrives in your account — as a deal, as a message on its timeline, or as a card on that board — and is yours to account for: telling them who is collecting it and why, having a lawful basis to keep it, answering them if they ask what you hold, and deciding how long to keep it. They are your contacts, not our users — we hold what they sent on your behalf and will point them back to you if they come to us.

The same goes for a customer's sign-off. When you send an inspection report or a charge sheet for signature — handing a technician's phone over on site, or emailing the link — the person who signs is yours, not ours: TRACE records the name and title they type, the signature they draw, the time, and the network address and browser they signed from, and holds all of it on your behalf. Telling them what is being recorded and why, and having a lawful basis for it, is yours as it is for anything else you collect through TRACE. A signing link lets whoever holds it read that one document, so send it to the person you mean to and treat it as you would the document. Left unanswered it stops working sixty days after it is sent or last changed, or at once if you revoke it or send the document back to Draft. Once it is signed or declined, or has stopped working, it shows nothing of the document any more — only that it was signed or declined, and when — and its PDF is no longer served through it. The signer's name, title, date and drawn signature appear on the copy of that document your customer's own portal logins can read, which is where the link tells them to find it; a customer with no portal login is told to ask you for a copy, and giving them one is yours. A signed document is kept as signed: a correction is made as a new revision, which keeps the signed copy and has to be signed again, and the same holds for any other record signed, approved, verified or accepted in TRACE. Before anyone signs in TRACE — a customer approving a document, or one of your own people signing a course, an exam, an acknowledgment or a record — the screen tells them in plain words that they are signing electronically, that by signing they agree the signature has the same effect as a handwritten one, and that TRACE records their name and the time with it, together with their login or the link they used; for a signature given through a link, TRACE also records the network address and browser, as this section says. That is the signer's own agreement, given to you. TRACE records a signature and the circumstances around it. Whether a signature captured that way satisfies the law or the contract governing the work between you and your customer is for you and your advisers to determine, and we make no representation that it does.

The same goes for a signing link. When you ask someone without a TRACE login to sign one of your records — an outside instructor's attendance sheet, a certification's final sign-off, an examiner's or proctor's signature, an inspector's field report, a safety talk's leader, a permit's issuer or an employee's acknowledgement, for example — TRACE emails them a link, and before they sign it emails a one-time code to the address you entered. It records the name they type, the time, the e-signature consent they were shown, and the network address and browser they signed from, and shows the signature as "email verified". That means only that whoever signed could read mail at that address; choosing the right person and the right address is yours. Nobody at your firm can sign in that person's place. The link shows whoever holds it the details of the record being signed — for an attendance sheet, the names of the people on it — so send it only to the person you mean. It can be signed once, within 14 days, unless your firm withdraws it first. Once it is signed, withdrawn or past those 14 days it can no longer be used to sign and shows nothing of the record, only that there is nothing left to do.

If a consultancy invited you as a client or technician user, your access and records are managed by that consultancy, and these terms apply to your use of the service. While that consultancy's account is deactivated, the client-portal and technician access it provides is suspended and its customer links stop working; access returns if the account is reactivated.

A client company can change consultancies without leaving TRACE. Its current consultancy releases it, whoever it hires next presents the handover code the client passes on, and the company itself accepts — no consultancy can accept on a client's behalf. On acceptance the records belonging to that company (its technicians, certifications, documents, written practices, appointments and equipment) come under the incoming consultancy's management, and these terms then apply between that company and that consultancy. The commercial records the outgoing consultancy raised — invoices, estimates, deals and jobs — remain theirs, since changing adviser does not settle an account. The company keeps its own portal logins throughout.

A client company can also move up to a workspace of its own. When its consultancy invites it and it signs up, the client holds that workspace and its subscription itself, and the program the consultancy kept for it — its technicians, certifications, training, compliance items, program documents, controlled procedures and forms, and appointments — is copied into it. The copy belongs to the client's workspace. The consultancy keeps its own records of that client unchanged, as history it can read but no longer alter, and the commercial records it raised (jobs, reports, charge sheets, estimates and invoices) stay with it. The client's primary user may give that consultancy standing access as its Level III: to read the client's own program, to deliver and approve procedures, forms, technique sheets and written practices, to sign the client's certifications as its Level III, and to issue new revisions of documents it wrote, which take effect when the client accepts them, or at once if the client has chosen to accept them automatically. The client's own certifying authority always gives a certification its final sign-off: it counts as signed only then, and a change made before then cancels the Level III signature, which must be given again. That access never extends to deleting records, billing, user management, the client's own clients, its internal notes about itself, or documents it marks for its own consultants only; it is recorded in the client's audit trail, is suspended while either account is deactivated, can be ended by either side at any time, and is separate from TRACE's own support access.

Sharing a task board with another firm. A consultant of your firm can invite one other TRACE firm to one task board, by its primary user's email or with a one-time code, and a consultant of that firm accepts. From then on that firm's consultants can read and work the board's lists, cards, comments, checklists and attachments, and see the names of your staff so they can be put on a card; they cannot see your other boards, the jobs or companies a card is linked to, or the board's history. Whatever they add to the board is your firm's record. Share a board only with a firm you mean to trust with what is on it, and keep out of it anything you must not show them. Either firm can end the share at any time and it stops at once. Deleting either firm ends it. If another firm shares a board with you, what you add to it belongs to that firm, not to yours.

Customers, witnesses and links. When you ask a customer's person or a third-party inspector to witness a step on a traveler, or give a Shop TV display link to a screen, the people you choose to tell are yours and so is what you tell them, as with any signing link above. A witness answers in their own name, in the customer's portal or through a link that shows them the traveler, job, customer, part and step it is about; telling them what is recorded, and having a lawful basis for it, is yours. A Shop TV link shows the open travelers on your shop-floor board — numbers, parts, steps and the first names of the crew — to anyone who holds it, so put it only on a screen you control, and cancel it when it is no longer needed. A certificate of conformance is emailed only to the customer contacts you tick, as a PDF; check the addresses before you send, because an email cannot be taken back.

Personnel records you keep in TRACE — including vision exam results and anything in the People module, such as onboarding and offboarding checklists, employment details, the cards and licences you record against a person, screenings, disciplinary records, and the documents you upload — are yours and your responsibility. You are the data controller for them; TRACE processes them only to operate the service. You decide what to collect, you confirm you have a lawful basis to keep it, and you set how long it is retained and when it is destroyed.

Where your technicians are is the same kind of decision, and TRACE makes you take it rather than take it for you. Recording it is off until your primary user switches it on from the Account page; while it is off nothing is recorded, and a position a device sends anyway is discarded before it is stored. With it on, clocking in on a job or on overhead time records the position the technician's device reports and, for a job, how far that was from the job's site address; the device asks them first, a refusal still clocks them in, and the position is deleted at clock-out while the distance stays with the hours. TRACE does not track anyone between clock-ins, does not record a route, and has no continuous or background location of any kind. Whether you may record even this of your staff, what you must tell them, and whether their agreement is needed are questions for you and your advisers — the laws on employee location monitoring differ by state and by country. Switching it on is your firm's decision, not ours, and so is telling your technicians that you have.

Screening and disciplinary records deserve their own sentence, because the law around them is not ours to satisfy for you. TRACE records that a drug test, alcohol test, background check or physical happened, who carried it out and whether your firm concluded the person was cleared. It does not record what was tested for, does not receive or interpret any result, and does not order, arrange or evaluate a screening. Whether you may require one, how you must obtain consent, what notices you owe the person, whether a background check brings you under consumer-reporting rules, how a result may lawfully be used, and how long any of it may be kept are yours to determine — with your own advisers, before you enter anything. The same goes for what you write into a disciplinary record. TRACE is a place to write it down, and nothing more.

Do not upload images of Social Security cards, passports, driver's licenses, or other government identity documents, full Social Security numbers, or medical test results unless you have a separate written agreement with us that covers them. Record that you verified a document and keep the copy in your own files — TRACE's checklists are built for exactly that. The restricted-document setting limits who inside your own account can open a file; it is an access control, not a legal safeguard, and it does not change your obligations under the laws that govern identity, employment, or medical information.

Paid plans are billed through Stripe on a monthly or annual cycle, at the prices shown on the pricing page when you subscribe. Prices for existing subscribers won't change without notice before your next billing cycle.

Moving up a plan changes the subscription you already have, rather than starting a second one. When your primary contact moves you to a larger plan, or switches between monthly and annual billing, Stripe works out what the time left on the plan you already paid for is worth, credits that against the new plan, and charges the balance to the card on file straight away. The change takes effect only when that charge succeeds — if the card is declined, nothing changes and nothing is charged. One subscription can run on only one billing cycle, so switching between monthly and annual moves any add-ons on it to the matching cycle at the same time.

Moving down to a smaller paid plan is yours to do, from Account settings. Before the change goes through, TRACE checks that the smaller plan still fits what you are already using — your client companies, your staff logins and your stored files. If something is over the smaller plan's limit we tell you which, and nothing changes until you are under it. The move itself takes effect straight away, and Stripe works out what the rest of the period on the larger plan was worth and holds that as a credit against your next invoice, rather than paying it back to your card. An Enterprise plan is a negotiated agreement, so moving off one is still a conversation with us.

You can cancel, or move down to the Free plan, at any time from Account settings. Changing the plan or buying add-ons is limited to your consultancy's primary contact, so that one person is answerable for what the consultancy spends; any colleague can ask them, or ask us. Cancelling or moving to Free stops future charges; you keep paid access through the end of the current billing period. Apart from the proration described above when you change plan part-way through a period — money taken when you move up, a credit against your next invoice when you move down — fees already paid are non-refundable except where the law requires otherwise.

Your card and your billing details sit with Stripe, not with us. From Account settings your primary contact can open Stripe's own billing page and there change the card on file, download past invoices and receipts as PDFs, and correct the billing name, email, address, phone number and tax ID that get printed on them. No card number ever reaches TRACE; what we learn from Stripe is whether a payment succeeded. That page does those things and nothing else — changing your plan, buying or cancelling add-ons, and cancelling altogether stay inside TRACE, so that what Stripe charges you and what your account is allowed to do cannot drift apart. The email address on Stripe's page is where your receipts go; it is not your TRACE sign-in, which changes only through the confirmation step on the Account page.

Trial periods, when offered, convert or expire as stated when the trial is granted. We may modify or discontinue trial offers.

Use TRACE only for lawful purposes. Don't attempt to break, probe, or overload the service; don't access other accounts' data; don't resell or sublicense the service; and don't upload malicious files. We may suspend accounts that put the service or other customers at risk, and we'll tell you if we do.

The TRACE API. The API comes with the Plus, Pro and Enterprise plans — not with the Free plan, and not with an account that has bought a single module on its own. Your primary contact may make API keys that let another program read your firm's records and, where you allow it, write them. While your firm is on any other plan its keys are refused, and they work again when it moves to Plus, Pro or Enterprise. A key acts for your firm: keep it secret, give it only the permissions the program needs, use it only for your own firm's work, and revoke it if you think it has been exposed — you are responsible for what is done with your keys. Each key may make a limited number of calls in a period (currently 600 every 15 minutes); don't try to get around that limit, or any other limit of your plan, by spreading calls across keys. We may throttle, suspend or revoke a key that puts the service or other customers at risk — at once, where a key appears to have been exposed or misused — and we'll email your primary contact the reason when we do. Records written through a key are your records, just as if they had been entered in TRACE, and a record that has been signed or reviewed in TRACE is not changed through the API.

Controlled information. You agree not to upload or enter Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI), technical data controlled under ITAR or the EAR, or classified information at any level. TRACE runs on commercial cloud infrastructure that is not FedRAMP Moderate authorized, and DFARS 252.204-7012 requires that of any cloud service which stores, processes, or transmits CUI — so this is a limit we cannot waive, and asking us to make an exception isn't something we're able to do. If your contracts require these records inside an accredited boundary, ask us about a self-hosted install. The Security page explains this in full.

The Community area. If you take part in Community — the member profiles, forum, and mentoring — remember that consultants at other consultancies — and technicians their firms have let into a topic — can read what you post, and post accordingly: no confidential client information, nothing you're under an obligation to keep private, and no abuse or harassment of other members. You keep ownership of what you write, and you grant us permission to display it to other members and to keep it visible if you later close your account, so conversations don't lose their replies. We may remove content or withdraw Community access where this section isn't met.

Chat and Community posts. What you post in your firm's chat or in Community must not be objectionable, abusive, harassing, hateful, sexually explicit or illegal. Anyone can report a post or message; your firm's owner and Office Administrators (for chat) and TRACE's moderators (for Community) may hide or remove it, other people may block you, and we may turn off your ability to post. Before your first post we ask you to agree to these rules.

We work to keep TRACE available and fast, but the service is provided "as is" and "as available," without warranties of any kind, express or implied — including fitness for a particular purpose and uninterrupted or error-free operation. We may perform maintenance, and features may change as the product improves.

To the maximum extent permitted by law: TRACE is not liable for indirect, incidental, special, or consequential damages — including lost profits, lost contracts, failed audits, loss of accreditation, or regulatory penalties — even if we've been advised such damages are possible.

Our total liability for any claim arising from the service is capped at the amount you paid TRACE in the twelve months before the event giving rise to the claim.

Some jurisdictions don't allow certain limitations, so parts of this section may not apply to you.

You can stop using TRACE and cancel at any time. We may suspend or terminate accounts that materially violate these terms, with notice where practicable.

If your firm cancels, its workspace keeps working until the end of the period you have already paid for. It is then read-only for 30 days: everyone at your firm can still sign in, open every record and download or export it, but nothing can be added or changed. At the end of those 30 days the workspace and its data — records, stored files, change history and the record of who opened which document — are permanently deleted, as described in the Privacy Policy. Your primary contact can undo the cancellation, or buy a plan again, at any time before then, and nothing is lost. Moving to the Free plan is not cancelling: it keeps your workspace and deletes nothing. If you want your data exported for you, or deleted sooner, contact us. If we terminate an account, the same applies from the day we end it: no further charges are taken, the workspace is read-only for 30 days, and its data is then permanently deleted; contact us within that time if you want it exported, or if you believe the termination is a mistake. The automatic deletion in this section applies from November 16, 2026: no account is deleted under it before then.

If these terms change in any meaningful way, we'll update the date at the top and, for material changes, notify account holders by email before the change takes effect. Continuing to use the service after that means you accept the updated terms.

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Nevada, without regard to conflict-of-law rules, and disputes will be resolved in the courts located there.

TRACE is an independent product. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by, certified by, or accredited by any standards body, accrediting body, certifying authority, credentialing program, contractor-qualification platform, accounting package, or other product named anywhere in the service or on this site.

That includes, without limiting it: ASNT, PRI and the Nadcap program, eAuditNet, ASME, ASTM International, the American Welding Society, SAE International, the American Petroleum Institute, ABS, NAVSEA, the ISO and AS standards bodies, the accreditation bodies A2LA and ANAB, OSHA, the NRC and state radiation control programs, the TSA and its Transportation Worker Identification Credential (TWIC) program, the contractor prequalification platforms named in section 3 and any similar platform, Intuit's QuickBooks, Stripe, Google (including Gmail and Google Workspace), and Microsoft (including Microsoft 365 and Outlook). Where TRACE refers to a scheme such as SNT-TC-1A, NAS410, CP-189 or AS9100, it does so to identify the standard a record is kept against — nothing more. TRACE does not issue, grant, endorse or verify any certification, accreditation or qualification, and does not reproduce or distribute the copyrighted text of any standard or audit criteria; where a module works against such content, your firm supplies the copy it is licensed to hold.

Where TRACE exports a file in a shape another program can import, that describes file compatibility and nothing else — there is no integration with, data sharing with, or endorsement by the maker of that program, and their product may change its import format at any time.

Where TRACE offers a connection to a service you hold your own account with — sending records to your QuickBooks Online company, sending your mail through your Google or Microsoft 365 mailbox, or taking a client's payment into your own Stripe account — you make that connection, to your account, under that company's terms. It is not a partnership with, or an endorsement by, that company. Section 15 covers those connections.

All product names, logos, and brands mentioned are the property of their respective owners, and all company, product and service names are used for identification only. Their use does not imply endorsement of TRACE by them, or of them by TRACE.

When something is sent. AI Assist sends nothing on its own. When one of your staff asks it for something, TRACE sends our AI provider, Anthropic, what that one request needs: the packet's files for an extraction; the checklist items and the procedures chosen for a pre-assessment; the question, and the records the assistant looks up, to answer it; the single document being summarized; the document a test's questions are drafted from; for a suggested essay mark, the question, its model answer and the candidate's answer, but not the candidate's name; and, for a drafted translation, the question as written — its text, answer choices, explanations, accepted answers and model answer — and the language wanted, with nothing about any candidate; and, for a suggested root cause, the finding's description, source and severity, what it already records about containment, correction, root cause and corrective action, and the name of the company it is about; and, to draft a form, the one document you pointed at, together with the method and the kind of form wanted; for a training certificate whose pages are scans or a photo, those pages or that photo, with the typed text already read from its other pages; for a calibration certificate that is a scan, its first pages and its file name; for a scanned blank report form you want printed on, its first page; and, for a self-audit cross-check, each checklist question the supplier answered YES, the note it wrote beside it, and the one paragraph of its procedure that note cites — never the whole procedure; and, when you press the button on the Import your files screen, the folder path and roughly the first 1,800 characters of text of each file TRACE's own rules were unsure about, never the file itself. The help chat sends what the person typed plus TRACE's own help content, and none of your records. Client-portal and technician logins cannot use AI Assist.

How it is handled. Anthropic processes these requests for us under its commercial terms, which say it may not train its models on them. Its published retention policy for API customers is to delete inputs and outputs within 30 days, keeping them longer only where its Usage Policy flags a request (up to two years) or where the law requires. TRACE has no zero-data-retention agreement with Anthropic, so that standard policy applies. Anthropic sets those terms and may change them; its current policy is published at privacy.claude.com, and our Privacy Policy lists Anthropic among our providers.

Turning it off. Your consultancy's primary user can turn AI off for the whole consultancy from the Account page, and back on the same way. While it is off, none of your staff can use AI Assist, TRACE's own staff will not run it on your records, and the help chat sends no questions from your staff, client-portal or technician logins — it points them to a person instead. Turning it off stops new requests; it does not recall anything already sent, and records you have already accepted stay as ordinary records. Whether AI Assist is included for your account is set by your plan and by us, so the primary user's switch can turn it off but cannot turn on what is not included.

Some features work by connecting an account your firm already holds with another company: your QuickBooks Online company, your own Google or Microsoft 365 mailbox, or your firm's own Stripe account. Connecting a mailbox or your firm's own Stripe account is live; the QuickBooks connection is built but not switched on yet, so it can't be made today, and this section says how it will work once it is. Nothing is connected unless someone at your firm chooses to — the QuickBooks and Stripe connections by your primary user, a mailbox by the person it belongs to — and each can be disconnected at any time. While connected, TRACE acts only as you direct: it sends your records to your accounting company, and your mail through your mailbox — and, only if you separately allow it for CRM mail logging, reads your mailbox's list of messages to file the ones exchanged with your firm's CRM contacts, as the Privacy Policy describes. Your use of those accounts is governed by your own agreement with that company, and what reaches them is held under their terms. We are not responsible for their services; if one refuses a request or stops working, TRACE tells you, and mail goes out the ordinary way instead.

Mail sent through your connected mailbox is sent as you, from your address. You are responsible for it as you would be for mail you wrote in that mailbox yourself, including having the right to send it to the people it addresses. If your primary user connects theirs, it also carries your firm's automatic mail, such as payment reminders. A connection belongs to you at one firm: if you work with more than one, you connect each separately, and leaving a firm removes the connection you made there.

Online payments. If your firm connects its own Stripe account, your clients can pay your invoices on Stripe's checkout pages, into that account. Each payment is between your firm and your client: your firm is the seller, the money goes to your firm under your firm's own agreement with Stripe, and Stripe's fees are your firm's. TRACE is not a party to the payment and is not a payment processor or money transmitter; it never holds the money and takes no fee on an invoice payment. Refunds, disputes, chargebacks and failed payments are settled between your firm, your client and Stripe. TRACE records a payment on the invoice when Stripe reports it, and that record is only as accurate as Stripe's report.

Selling courses. With the Learning add-on, your firm may offer one of its own published courses for sale on a public course page, at a price your firm sets; a buyer may buy one place for themselves or several for their people. The buyer pays on Stripe's checkout pages into your firm's own Stripe account: your firm is the seller of the course, responsible for its content, its price, any tax on it and any refund, under your firm's own agreement with Stripe, and TRACE is not a party to the sale. When Stripe reports a payment, TRACE files the buyer — or, for several places, each person the buyer names — as a person on your firm's Students company, assigns them the course and invites them to sign in (or asks an existing TRACE user to link the record). A full refund in Stripe ends access to that course for everyone it paid for; a record someone already signed is kept, because it records something that happened. A partial refund leaves access as it was.

TRACE's fee on course sales. TRACE keeps a platform fee of 10% of the price of each course sold, taken by Stripe from the payment as TRACE's application fee and shown on the course's Sell card before you put it on sale; Stripe's own processing fees are your firm's, as above. When your firm refunds a sale, TRACE returns the same share of its fee as the share of the price refunded. TRACE may change the fee on 30 days' notice by email; a sale keeps the fee in force when it was made. There is no fee on anything else your firm is paid through its Stripe account.

This section takes effect on November 1, 2026. A consultancy on a paid plan (Plus or above) can refer other firms to TRACE with its own referral link or code, shown on its Account page. When a firm signs up through it and pays for TRACE, the referring firm earns account credit of 20% of what that firm actually pays us — after tax and discounts, and not counting anything refunded — for the first 12 months after that firm's first payment. The firm that was referred gets 10% off its first 90 days.

Each credit is held for 60 days after the payment it comes from, and is then applied to the referring firm's own TRACE bill, where Stripe takes it off the next invoice. If that payment is refunded or disputed, the credit is cancelled, or taken back if it has already been applied. A firm earns only while it is on a paid plan; a firm that moves to Free keeps credit it has already earned, which applies when it pays again. Nothing is earned on a trial, a free account or an unpaid invoice. Enterprise accounts are agreed individually, and earn only what their agreement says.

Referral credit is a discount on TRACE, not money. It has no cash value, cannot be paid out, sold or moved to another account, and TRACE never holds it for you as money (see section 15). Each account has one referrer, fixed at its first payment. A firm cannot refer itself, its own house company, or a firm that shares its people, its card or its email domain; we review referrals that look like that before any credit is given, and may decline them. We may change or end the program with notice to the firms taking part; credit a firm has already earned stays with it.