Data retention

By default, workbook data stays in Vern indefinitely. If your compliance posture requires bounded retention, set a retention policy and Vern will purge automatically on a schedule.

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Set the policy

Open the user menu (bottom left) and choose Data retention — it’s only shown to Admins. Pick a window:

• Never — data stays until you delete it. This is the default.
• 7 days
• 30 days
• 90 days
• 180 days
• 365 days

Each window is measured from the workbook’s last activity. These are the only accepted values — retention is a fixed set of presets rather than a free-text number of days, so there’s no “custom” window. The policy applies to every company under your account. Before you confirm, Vern tells you how many existing workbooks are already inactive for longer than the window you picked. Those are deleted on the next daily run, without a warning email, because they’re already past it. Otherwise, owners get a warning email roughly 7 days before a workbook is deleted.

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What gets purged

When a workbook passes its retention window, Vern deletes:

• Workbook sheet data (cell values)
• Uploaded source files
• Import run history, the agent conversation, and any saved migration state
• Export files generated from that workbook

Separately, and regardless of workbook activity, Vern sweeps company-scoped data that used to accumulate indefinitely:

• Integration logs — including the datasets and embeddings derived from them
• Cached import questions and answers — free text reused across runs

Short-lived artefacts have their own fixed windows and are removed independently of your policy:

• Export jobs and their files — 24 hours
• Agent activity streams (the live feed of an agent run) — 14 days

The company itself and your templates aren’t touched — only customer data.

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What “last activity” means

The clock resets every time a user edits a sheet, runs an import, or makes other changes within the workbook. A workbook in active onboarding never expires; an abandoned one will.

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Closing an account

When you offboard a customer or close an account, Vern removes everything belonging to that tenant — workbooks and their files, integration logs, cached questions, stored credentials, and cached values — not just the data a retention window would have caught. Stored source credentials are purged from the secret store and any cached copies cleared at the same time, so a deleted tenant leaves no usable credential behind. This also happens automatically when a subscription ends: 30 days after a plan is cancelled or a trial lapses, the account is marked for offboarding, and after a dry run and at least one further day, its data is purged.

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Access and audit

Two things worth knowing when someone asks how customer data is protected day to day:

• Exporting is Admin-only. Downloading a sheet or workbook is restricted to Admins, because it materialises a full dataset into a file that leaves Vern. See Team.
• Administrative actions and data access are logged. Vern keeps an append-only record of privileged operations, so “who exported this, and when?” has an answer.

Uploaded logos and avatars are stored privately and served through short-lived signed links rather than public URLs.

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Compliance posture

This is the simplest path to a data-minimization story. If your customers ask “how long does Vern keep our data?”, this is the answer. For stronger guarantees (per-workbook policies, immediate purge), contact us.

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Next

• Team — roles, and who can export.
• API keys — control programmatic access.