Privacy notice

Who this is about

STRATON is a workforce management platform for field companies: clocking in and out, work locations, schedules, timesheets and payroll periods. It is operated by BELNEX Energy, which can be reached at contact@belnexenergy.be.

Two different relationships are covered here, and they are not the same in law. When a company signs up and uses STRATON to manage its own people, that company decides what is recorded about its workers and why: it is the controller, and STRATON acts on its instructions as a processor. Separately, for the account itself — who registered, the address we write to, what was asked of support — STRATON is the controller.

A worker who wants their own record corrected or explained should ask their employer first. Their employer decides; we act on that decision.

What is recorded

Account and identity: name, e-mail address, telephone number if given, preferred language and time zone, and the profile picture if one is uploaded.

Employment within a company on the platform: job title and function, the roles that decide what the person may see and do, team membership, and any professional certificates recorded — for example a VCA or BA5 attestation, with its expiry date.

Work: the moment a shift is started and ended, break minutes, notes typed by the person, which work location and which subdivision of it, and which task or assignment the hours belong to. From those, the timesheets, their approval status, and the payroll consolidations built on them.

Scheduling: assignments a person is booked onto, declared availability and absences, shift swaps proposed and approved, and the notifications sent about all of it.

Housekeeping: an audit trail of significant changes, and technical logs. The logs carry an event name and identifiers, never the contents of a record — the fields that may be logged are a fixed list in the code.

Location: what is not recorded

STRATON does not store where a worker is. This is the part most systems of this kind get wrong, so it is stated precisely.

When someone clocks in, their phone may offer its position. That position is used once, in the moment, to answer a single question — is this clock-in at the work location? — and is then discarded. What is written to the database is the answer: yes, no, or unknown, together with a distance rounded to the nearest ten metres. There is no column for a worker's coordinates, and the columns that once existed were deleted.

The distinction matters. A coordinate does not say "at the Le Parc site"; it says where this person was, at that minute. Clock in from home, from a café, from a doctor's waiting room, and it would be on the record forever. The company's legitimate question is which site the hours belong to, and answering it does not require keeping a trail.

Work locations themselves do have coordinates. Those belong to the company — a site is entered once, with its address — and they are what the map is drawn from.

Why it is held

To run the service the employer asked for: recording hours, planning work, producing timesheets and payroll figures, and telling people what has changed about their week.

Because an employer has obligations of its own. Records of hours worked are kept because employment and social security law requires an employer to be able to produce them.

To keep the platform working and secure: diagnosing faults, preventing abuse, and being able to reconstruct who changed what.

For an employee, consent is generally not the basis for any of this, and deliberately so: consent given by a worker to their employer is weak, because the relationship is not one between equals. What is done is what is necessary to perform the employment relationship and to comply with the law.

Who can see it

Inside a company: what someone sees depends on their role. A worker sees their own hours, their own schedule and the sites they are on. A supervisor sees the team they are responsible for. An administrator or payroll role sees the company's records. These limits are enforced by the database itself, per row, not only by the screens.

Between companies: nothing crosses. Where two companies work together on the same site as partners or subcontractors, each sees only what that arrangement requires.

BELNEX Energy: staff can reach customer data only when it is necessary to run or repair the service, or when the customer asks for help.

Who else processes it

The platform runs on services provided by others, each acting on our instructions: Supabase for the database, authentication and e-mail delivery; Vercel for hosting the application; and MapTiler for map imagery, which receives a request for the area being looked at when a map is opened, and no information about who is looking at it.

A current list of these providers and of where they process data is available from contact@belnexenergy.be.

One case is chosen by the worker rather than by us. A worker may generate a personal calendar subscription link for their own schedule. If they add it to Google Calendar, Outlook or another calendar, their schedule — the job title, the hours, the site address — is then read by that provider under that provider's own terms. Instructions and notes are never included in that feed. The link can be revoked at any time, and the platform shows when it was last read, which is what makes a leaked link visible to the person it belongs to.

How long it is kept

Working-time records are kept for as long as the employer needs them to meet its own legal obligations, which for payroll and social-security purposes is measured in years rather than months.

Account data is kept while the account is in use. When a company leaves the platform, its data is deleted or returned on request.

A revoked calendar subscription keeps only the fact that it existed and the digest of its address — never the address itself — so that a link which leaked can still be investigated.

Your rights

Anyone whose data is held may ask for a copy of it, ask for it to be corrected, ask for it to be deleted, ask for its use to be restricted, object to its use, and ask to receive it in a portable form.

For anything recorded by an employer through STRATON, the request goes to that employer, who decides it. For the account itself, write to contact@belnexenergy.be.

Anyone who believes their data is being handled wrongly may complain to the Belgian Data Protection Authority — Gegevensbeschermingsautoriteit / Autorité de protection des données, Rue de la Presse 35, 1000 Brussels — or to the supervisory authority of the country they live in.

Changes

The date at the top of this page is the date of the last substantive change. Where a change affects what is collected or why, customers are told before it takes effect rather than after.