Questions worth asking.

Yes, if you are a school, academy trust, college or council. You are a public authority under the Freedom of Information Act, so a request can ask for staff messages, and you may refuse one as too costly only when finding the information would take more than 18 hours. On a connected paid plan, every channel’s conversation is held in your own Microsoft 365 subscription, so your own people search it with Microsoft Purview like any other record, not by a manual search of staff phones. Most care providers and charities are not public authorities under the Act. The Answerable Guarantee covers subject access requests, not Freedom of Information requests.

Quickly, once your Global Admin runs the install – that is what starts the clock. None of our channels touch Meta: your own channels and Microsoft Teams need no phone number at all, so once your Microsoft 365 is set up they capture into it from day one. Your published number for the SMS doorbell is live within days, and it is there to reach people, not the centre of things, so it never holds up your go-live. Your evidence pack – Microsoft Purview keeping and holding your records – settles within about a week as Microsoft applies it in the background. Your part is the admin install and approving the wording people are shown.

In your own channels and on Microsoft Teams the record is made inside your own systems, so there is no other messaging store to square up at all. Messages sent through a channel, verified by text, are written straight into the record as they're sent – there's no separate encrypted store to reconcile with, because the channel is ours to run. From there each message is kept in your own Microsoft 365 subscription, under your own retention schedules and your rules for holding and reading it. We do not claim that nobody can read the record – you can't have both a usable record and one nobody can read. Any supplier promising both is misrepresenting how this works.

Yes, and we make it automatic. Telling people is both a GDPR rule and the right thing to do, so everyone added to a channel gets a notice telling them it is on the record, and can object or leave at any time. We also give you wording for staff, for relatives joining a channel, and for your trustee board. In practice, almost everyone is reassured rather than alarmed.

New text invitations include a "Not expecting this? Decline" option on the invitation page. It removes your number from that channel without creating an account or sending a reply. You can also leave a channel from within ComplyChat.

Yes. On paid plans, a private line can use a complete CSV contact list uploaded by an administrator or read from a fixed file in the connected Microsoft 365 archive library. Set it to check daily, weekly or only on demand. Your existing system must produce and update the export; this is not a direct MIS connector. The first import is previewed before it is applied, and large removals or identity changes need review. Access managed by the source ends when a contact is no longer eligible, subject to explicit administrator exceptions. One contact can be linked to several records: for example, staff can see a parent's children and their year groups, and the parent keeps access while any association remains eligible. Record labels and displayed fields are configurable, so the same feature can serve other organisations. Invitation texts are optional and start switched off.

Yes. A task is a message that asks named people in a chat to do something and records whether they did: the sender picks who it is for, what needs doing and when it is needed by, and each of those people gets a Done button. Marking it done posts nothing into the chat, so a task given to twelve people doesn't become twelve messages – but when the record is sealed, one line naming who did it and when goes into the chat and files into your own Microsoft 365. Once somebody has marked it done, the task can no longer be edited. Because tasks and acknowledgements live inside chats, there is also one Outstanding view that gathers them across every channel, in two halves: what others have asked of you, and what you have asked of others, with anything overdue pinned to the top. It deliberately has no buttons of its own – you finish something in the conversation it belongs to, so the record and its context stay together. And the person doing a task doesn't need a Microsoft 365 licence, so it works for a family member, a bank worker or a volunteer. There is no integration with Microsoft Planner, To Do or Shifts.

Yes. Anywhere messaging has become important to how you work, keeping a record of it becomes important too. Fundraising teams, volunteer coordinators, safeguarding leads and trustee chats are all covered on the channels you run, your published numbers and Microsoft Teams alike. You pay one flat price per tier no matter how many staff use it, and adding people is always free, so using it more widely never costs more.

You talk, mostly – and you use it. Bring the scenario that worries you: the group nobody admits to, the leaver with two years of messages on their phone, the SAR you'd dread. In the first minute or two we put a real channel on your own phone and you send a message in it yourself, rather than watching us demonstrate it. We map your exposure against the rules that apply to you as we go, and before the call ends we invite you into your own client portal, where you sign in with your Microsoft work account and see your own record. There is nothing to install, nothing to prepare and nothing to pass, and if we're not the fit we'll say so on the call.

Yes. We invoice you and you pay by bank transfer, which is how a school, college or charity finance office usually wants to buy. If you work to purchase orders, raise one and send us the number – or the PO form itself – and we'll quote it on your invoice. Fees are exclusive of VAT, added at the prevailing rate where applicable, and a yearly plan is invoiced in advance for the year. Card payment is available too, through Stripe; tell us which you prefer. Billing questions go to enquiries@chat.org.uk.

You take everything that matters with you – and the record itself already lives in your own Microsoft 365, so the records were never ours to hold back. To be just as clear about what stops: the service stops – capturing new messages, your channels, the Teams links, the SMS doorbell and the admin page all end with the subscription – but your record stays in your own Microsoft 365. Every message saved up to that day stays yours, in your own Microsoft 365. Any published number we run for you: we will either help you port it to your own account, where your provider allows, or release it and close it. The little we do hold – account records, settings – is sent to you in open formats within fourteen days, its deletion confirmed in writing, and we help you change any passwords we ever handled. There are no fees to leave. We intend to earn the renewal, not enforce it.

Less than you'd fear, because of where the record of truth lives. Your permanent record is saved into your own Microsoft 365, per organisation and never pooled, and we never become your system of record. To run the channel we hold a working copy of message content in our own multi-tenant Azure – so a break-in at our end could expose operational conversation data, including subscription history unless you set a shorter working-copy retention window, never a permanent, pooled archive of every client. You control how long that working copy lasts: set a retention window in your client portal, from 30 days to three years, after which each message's content is purged once it has been filed into your own Microsoft 365; on Enterprise the working copy is held in a dedicated database of your own rather than the shared one. Our central billing and account systems hold only the dull layer: account records, settings, billing. We guard all of it to the standards in the security section, and if it were ever broken into we would tell you within the time UK GDPR sets, in plain English. In May 2025, a message-archiving company that made itself the permanent system of record – pooling readable copies of every client's WhatsApp and Signal messages on its own servers – was broken into, and the messages were reportedly taken in well under half an hour. The lesson is not to let a vendor pool everyone's permanent records in one vault: your record of truth stays in your own tenant, never ours. When you compare suppliers, put this exact question to each of them – and ask where the permanent record lives.

Every text carrying a sign-in code warns that nobody from ComplyChat or your organisation will ever ask for it, and every new sign-in or new passkey sends an alert to the member's other devices that have notifications turned on. A member who thinks someone else has their account can choose "Someone else may have access to my account": it signs them out on every device and, on paid plans, tells your organisation. From the client portal, your administrators can sign a member out of all their devices, withdraw join links, choose who can start a direct message, and review one account's activity and who it was in contact with. Members can report a message or a person and say why, and the person reported is not told. The detail is on How it works.

No. ComplyChat gives your community the familiar messaging experience they already know, inside a channel you own – verified by SMS, never routed through Meta's network. Staff answer from Microsoft Teams, and you meet your retention schedules within your own Microsoft 365 subscription.

Tap your profile picture to reposition it, or choose a new photo. Channel admins can add, replace and reposition a channel picture. A portal administrator appoints a channel admin from the portal's Channels page (People, then Make channel admin); only a member of staff can hold the role. Channel info shows members and available online or last-seen activity. Last seen uses approximate periods and respects the sharing setting: if you turn off your own last-seen sharing, you cannot see other people's activity either.

You can point your published number at an open line. Anyone who texts it gets one reply with a secure link that opens their own on-the-record conversation on that line, in their browser. They install nothing and need no Microsoft account. Every message is kept in your own Microsoft 365 subscription, under the retention schedules you already run, and everyone is told it is on the record.