This page answers the questions an IT or security review usually asks first. The security page covers every control in more detail, and the privacy policy lists what is collected and why.
Calendar access
Hourari changes your calendar when you ask it to. The one exception is a setting an owner or admin can turn on that ends recurring meetings nobody reviewed. It is off by default, and the organizer is always asked first.
Connecting Google Calendar or Outlook gives Hourari read and write access. Write access is there because declining a meeting and shortening one are things Hourari does when you ask it to. The one change it makes without being asked each time is ending an unreviewed recurring series, and only when that setting is on: Hourari asks the organizer to review the series first, waits for the notice period, and tells them when it ends it. The setting is available on paid plans. See Cut expensive meetings.
For Google, Hourari reads your primary calendar only. Other calendars you subscribe to are not read.
How calendar and Slack tokens are stored
Access tokens never reach your browser. They are kept in an encrypted secrets store that only Hourari's backend can read.
The connection records in the database hold a reference to the secret, not the token itself, so a database export or backup does not contain live credentials. Signed-in accounts have no permission to read those columns, including their own. A nightly check confirms that has not changed.
When you disconnect a calendar or Slack, Hourari deletes the connection and the tokens behind it. Google and Slack also let Hourari cancel the grant on their side, and it does. Microsoft offers no way to do that, so to withdraw Outlook access completely, also remove Hourari from your Microsoft account's apps and permissions page. See Connect Outlook.
Salaries and hourly rates
One person's salary is never shown to another person in the workspace, except the owner. No role, setting or plan changes that.
Salaries, default rates and per-person cost breakdowns are withheld in the database itself, not just hidden in the app. A signed-in account cannot read them directly, whether it asks through the app, the API or a direct query. They come out only through functions that check who is asking. Who sees meeting costs is a separate setting, explained in Who can see costs.
All data is encrypted in transit and at rest. Salary columns are not encrypted field by field on top of that. The permission check above is what keeps them private.
Meeting descriptions
A meeting's description, meaning its agenda and any notes in it, can be read only by the people in that meeting: its organizer and everyone invited. Owners, admins and team leads who are not in a meeting see its time, length, attendees and cost, but not its description. This is the same on every plan and for every role, and like salaries it is enforced in the database, not just hidden in the app.
Hourari still records whether a meeting has an agenda, so agenda reminders, value and waste scores and the "no agenda" filter work the same for everyone.
Sensitive meeting titles
Some meetings should count toward your totals without anyone seeing what they were about, such as interviews or performance reviews. The owner or an admin can list words for this in Settings → Meeting rules → What counts as a meeting, under Hide titles that contain. This works on every plan.
A meeting whose title contains one of those words, in any capitalisation, is stored as "Private event", without its title or description. Its time, length, attendees and cost are kept, so totals stay correct, and it is left out of agenda reminders and agenda scores, the same as an event marked private in the calendar. Everyone, including the owner, sees it as "Private event".
The change applies at the next sync, within about 30 minutes, to meetings from the start of last month onward. Older meetings, and the titles shown on recurring series reviews and approval requests, are hidden within about 30 minutes too. Because adding a word can't be fully undone, Hourari asks you to confirm first. Removing a word shows the titles again for meetings from the start of last month onward, which Hourari reads from your calendar again. Older meetings, series reviews and approval requests stay "Private event", because their stored title has been replaced. A meeting you create or rename in Hourari is hidden straight away, and so is the title on an approval request for it. Your calendar keeps the real title.
A word can be on only one of the two lists.
To leave a meeting out of costs and totals entirely instead, use Ignore events whose title contains in the same card.
How long data is kept
The title, description and attendee list of a meeting are cleared after 12 months. Only the date, length, number of attendees and cost are kept for your totals.
Enterprise workspaces can choose a shorter period in Settings → Access & data → Data retention.
When you delete your account, your data is removed from the live service straight away and is never restored from a backup. Copies can remain in the hosting provider's encrypted backups until those expire on their normal schedule. Export or delete your data has the steps.
What Hourari does not claim
Hourari has no SOC 2 or ISO 27001 report and has not had a third-party penetration test. Everything on this page rests on controls in the product, and we can show you any of them. Send a security questionnaire to hello@hourari.com. For a Data Processing Agreement, write to legal@hourari.com.