Privacy notice
This notice explains what Universal Beers Ltd (“we”) collects when you use our website, your trading account and our mobile apps, why we hold it, and what you can ask us to do with it. It is written for the licensed trade in the United Kingdom.
- Who we are
- Universal Beers Ltd, trading as Universal Beers, 157-159 New John St, Halesowen B62 8HT, United Kingdom. Company number 07129108, VAT registration 985972936, alcohol wholesaler registration (AWRS) XRAW00000100805. We are the data controller for everything described here. For anything about your data, email info@universalbeers.co.uk or call 0800 772 3377.
- What you give us
- When you apply for a trading account: your name, work email, phone number, the venue’s trading name and address, and company or VAT numbers where you have them. Once the account is open: delivery addresses and site contacts, the people you add to the account, your orders, deliveries, invoices and payments, and anything you write to us by email, on the phone or through support.
- What our apps collect
- The customer app holds your account and your orders, keeps your sign-in token in the device’s secure storage, and keeps an offline copy of the catalogue and your recent orders so it still works in a cellar with no signal. The staff app is for our employees only: it uses the camera to read barcodes and door codes while receiving, picking and loading, it uploads a photograph when a goods-in check or a delivery does not match the paperwork, and it captures a signature on the driver’s device as proof of delivery. Neither app asks for your location, and neither tracks a driver: a delivery is followed by scans and stops, never by following a person. No advertising identifiers, no third-party analytics or advertising SDKs, and we do not sell personal data or share it for advertising.
- What the website collects on its own
- A session cookie once you sign in, a theme preference if you set one, and the age confirmation from the door gate. Our servers keep ordinary technical logs — IP address, browser, page and timing — to keep the service secure, find faults and block abuse. We do not run advertising or cross-site tracking cookies.
- Why we use it, and on what basis
- To review a trade application, run your account, take and deliver orders, invoice and chase payment: performance of a contract with you, or steps taken before entering one. To keep VAT, company and alcohol wholesale records: legal obligations, including our duties under the AWRS. To keep the service secure, prevent fraud, manage credit and improve what we build: our legitimate interests, weighed against your rights. Where we ask for consent — for anything optional — you can withdraw it at any time.
- Who else sees it
- Only service providers who process it for us, under contract, on our instructions: Stripe for card payments (your card details go straight to Stripe — we never see or store them), Resend for order and account emails, Neon for the database, Cloudflare R2 for photographs, and Better Stack for error and performance logs. A map of planned delivery stops is drawn by Google’s static maps service, which receives the stop addresses and never a driver’s position. Beyond that: our accountants and professional advisers, and anyone we are required by law to tell — HMRC, the police or a regulator on a lawful request.
- Where it is processed
- Some of those providers operate outside the United Kingdom. Where that happens, the transfer is covered either by UK adequacy regulations or by the UK International Data Transfer Addendum to the European Commission’s standard contractual clauses. You can ask us which safeguard applies to a particular provider.
- How long we keep it
- Applications and account data for as long as the account is open, then for a limited period afterwards so we can answer questions and satisfy an audit. Orders, invoices and delivery records for the six years UK VAT and company law require, counted from the end of the accounting period. Delivery signatures and discrepancy photographs are kept with the order they belong to. Technical logs are kept for a short period and then discarded. When a retention period ends, we delete or anonymise.
- Your rights
- Under UK GDPR you can ask us for a copy of your data, to correct it, to erase it, to restrict or object to how we use it, and to receive it in a portable form — each within the limits the law sets, and none of them override the records we must keep by law. Email info@universalbeers.co.uk and we will answer within one month. If you are not satisfied, you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office at ico.org.uk or on 0303 123 1113; we would rather you came to us first.
- Changes to this notice
- We publish changes on this page. Anything that materially changes what we collect or why is announced in your account or by email before it takes effect, not slipped in quietly.
Last updated 14 September 2026
