For the people who run the table

Universities, health authorities, school districts, municipalities and crown corporations. Several unions, several agreements, a mandate set somewhere else, and a labour relations team smaller than anyone outside it assumes.

The record is held in Canada · Your documents stay in your own systems

The advantage to you

The round stops living in mailboxes, so the next one does not start by reconstructing the last one.

Your documents stay in your own systems, under your own retention rules, which keeps records management and access to information intact rather than creating a second copy somewhere you have to account for.

What was tabled, who received it, what was agreed and what was held over becomes a record you can produce, rather than a reconstruction assembled from four people’s inboxes eighteen months later.

What is hard about this today

Not because anyone is doing it badly. Because the tools were not built for a negotiation with two sides who cannot share a workspace.

Two sets of files: Your preparation cannot go anywhere the union might reach, so it lives in a private folder, a spreadsheet and a group chat. Nobody can see the whole position at once, including you.
The first hour: Every session opens with working out what changed since the last one, because the versions arrived as attachments and somebody is working from a superseded copy.
Turnover: The person who knows why a clause reads the way it does moves on between rounds, and the reasoning goes with them. What survives is the agreement, not the account of how it was reached.
Afterwards: A grievance, an arbitration or an access request arrives, and answering it means reading mailboxes rather than running a query.

What changes

A sealed room: Your bargaining committee, your counsel and your finance people work in a room the union cannot see and cannot know the contents of. Neither can we. Your preparation is preparation again rather than something to be careful about.
One table: What you table is at the table, dated and attributed, with an order of business both sides adopted. Settled items stop being reopened because both sides are looking at the same status.
Your storage: Documents stay in systems your organisation owns. We hold the record of what happened, not the documents it happened to.
Costing that holds: An offer costed against the shape of your actual workforce rather than an average, so the figure you take to your mandate holder survives being questioned.
One round to the next: The record belongs to the institution rather than to the people who happened to be in the room. A new director inherits the account of the last round instead of the folklore.

The parts your general counsel will ask about

Records and retention: Because documents remain in your own systems, your retention schedule continues to apply to them without anything being copied into a vendor’s platform to be governed separately.
Access to information: What is held, and by whom, is stated rather than described in general terms. If a request lands, you are answering from your own systems and a record you can export, not from ours.
The record itself: Your organisation can export its own record and check that nothing in it has been altered, using a program that never contacts us. That check runs on your own machine and does not depend on our cooperation or our continued existence.
Data location: The record is held in Canada. Documents are wherever your own systems are, which is your decision and not ours.
Certification: We do not hold a SOC 2 report yet. The dates we are working to are published and treated as commitments, on the assumption that your reviewer will write them down.

When it goes to arbitration

Already in shape: What was exchanged, when, by whom, and what each side said about it is dated and attributed as it happens rather than assembled afterwards under time pressure.
A third party at the table: A mediator or a conciliator can be given a seat at the shared table that lets them read what was exchanged and nothing from either caucus. Who admitted them is part of the record.
Nothing to take on faith: The other side can check the record independently, which means it is worth more to you than a record only you can vouch for.

What it does not do

Named here rather than found later. Anything missing from this list that matters to you is a question worth asking, and we will answer it the same way.

It does not bargain for you, recommend a position, or replace your counsel. It is a working surface and a record.
It does not tell you whether an agreement is valid, enforceable or properly ratified. That is your authority and your law, not our software.
It does not connect to a signing service today, so the handoff to signature is a step you take yourself.
It does not have single sign on today. That is four to six weeks of work once your identity people give us what we need, and we would rather say so than imply it exists.
It cannot trace a leaked page of a bargaining document back to who held it. Records we issue ourselves carry a per recipient code; the documents in your own storage do not.

Where to go next

The trust page · live checks, sub-processors, and what is not certified
Use cases · five situations, four lines each
Document integrity · what a fingerprint proves and what it does not

Both sides of a negotiation get the same product. If you want to know what the people across the table are being told, it is on public sector employers, government and mandate holders and unions. We would rather you read all three.