Privacy Policy | Uncle Onion's Lawn

Effective January 4, 2023

Edited March 3, 2023: fixed typos and updated information pertaining to payment method storage and processing.

Uncle Onion’s Lawn Service, LLC Privacy Policy

Uncle Onion’s Lawn Service, LLC, DBA Uncle Onion’s Electric, Organic Lawn Service, and Uncle Onion’s Electric, Organic Lawn Care, are wholly owned by Aaron Johnson. The business address is 6782 Courthouse Commons Blvd, Spotsylvania, VA 22553. The website located at www.UncleOnionsLawn.com is owned by Aaron Johnson and Uncle Onion’s Lawn Service, LLC. Uncle Onion’s Lawn Care, LLC was formed in Virginia and certified by the Virginia State Corporation Commission on January 4, 2023.

The names and titles Uncle Onion, Uncle Onion’s, Uncle Onion’s Lawn Service, LLC, Uncle Onion’s Electric, Organic Lawn Service, Uncle Onion’s Electric, Organic Lawn Care, and Uncle Onion’s True Price are copyright Aaron Johnson, 2023.

Definitions of terms used in this Document

Uncle Onion’s Lawn Care, LLC is referred to as “we” and “us” throughout this Privacy and Use Policy.

The reader of this Privacy and Use Policy and our clients are referred to as “you” throughout this Privacy and Use Policy.

This Privacy and Use Policy may be referred to as “Policy” or “Document” throughout this Document.

A potential client is any person or entity inquiring about services from us.

A client is any person or entity that has accepted a quote and is scheduled to receive services from us, is actively receiving services from us, or has received services from us at any time in the past.

Uncle Onion loves potential clients and clients equally.

Collection of information

We collect personal information such as:

First and last name
Phone number
Email address
Home address (or address where services are desired)
Credit card or banking information (payment information)
Information pertaining to your personal property.

If you are applying for employment, are an employee of Uncle Onion’s Lawn Service, LLC, or are a contractor performing services for Uncle Onion’s Lawn Service, LLC and/or our clients, we may collect other information required by law. This information may include your social security number and documentation showing you are legally allowed to work in the US, in addition to other information that may or may not be required by law.

Why do we collect this information?

We collect information from clients and potential clients for the purpose of providing accurate price quotes to offer you our services and to contact you about our services. Any information you provide to us is voluntary.

How information is collected

You voluntarily provide information through our website, email, over the phone, or in person. Our website, www.UncleOnionsLawn.com does not collect personal information about you without you explicitly entering it, but we do track data that tells us how many visits we are getting and the general location where those visits are coming from. See our Website Use and Privacy Policy for more information about the information we collect through the website, how we collect information on the website, and what we use that information for.

Credit card and banking information are collected through secure, trusted third-party payment processing applications. We do not have access to your payment information from these third-party payment applications, but we can automatically charge your account at any time. See our Terms and Conditions for more information on when your account is charged by us.

Quickbooks requires us to have our clients sign a credit card authorization form for recurring payments. We normally do not use Quickbooks for our recurring credit card processing, but when we do use credit card processing services through Quickbooks, we’ll have our clients provide their payment information through the Credit Card Authorization Form that Quickbooks provides to us. This authorization form can only be completed by you. We can send the form to you via email, or you can fill it out and give it to us in person or mail it back to us. Our mailing address is:

Uncle Onion’s Lawn Service, LLC

c/o Aaron Johnson

6782 Courthouse Commons Blvd

Spotsylvania Courthouse, VA. 22553

See Storing your payment information for more information on how these forms are stored.

See our Terms and Conditions for payment methods we accept.

How is this information used?

We may use the information you provide to us to contact you regarding our services or, if you are applying for employment, for offers of employment. We may contact your neighbors about our services based on your address if we feel your neighborhood would benefit from our services. We will never share your information with others in your neighborhood, even if your information was used in the discovery of a specific neighborhood.

We may view your property through satellite imagery. We may drive by the property address provided by you, but will not enter the property without prior consent. We reserve the right to enter the property without prior consent for the sole purpose of establishing contact with you. This may include knocking on the door, ringing the doorbell, and/or leaving our contact information in a conspicuous location. We will not enter through closed gates, or enter any area of the property not reasonably assumed to be open to the general public for the purpose of making contact with the property occupant. We will respect your privacy and private property to the best of our ability.

Your Privacy

We will never sell or give away your information without a warrant. Your information is closely guarded by us. Your information is kept on file as long as you are an active client, employee, or contractor. If your account goes inactive, or you do not select services from us, we will retain your information for three years, or as long as required by law, for record keeping and audit purposes.

From time to time, we will contact neighbors of our clients when we feel a specific neighborhood could benefit from our services. This could include knocking on doors. In these instances, we will not provide any identifiable information about you to neighbors, without your consent, but we will tell others in your area that we are mowing lawns in their neighborhood.

Storing your payment information

Your payment information may be stored by a number of secure methods. Any payment information you enter into our online services is stored via our third-party payment collection services.

Some of our payment collection services, such as Quickbooks, require us to keep a Credit Card Authorization Form on file. We store this information either in a locked storage device in a secure area of our office, or it is scanned and stored electronically on secure digital media storage devices. Paper documents will be destroyed after the information has been scanned into a digital media storage device.

Digital media storage devices include hard drives and USB thumb drives. Any device we use to store payment information will require a password for access. We make every attempt to use two-factor authentication, meaning two methods of unlocking the device must be present at the same time to access the information stored on the device.

We only store this information as required by law, or as required by our third-party payment collection service(s). When possible and allowable, any written or electronic payment information being stored locally by us will be destroyed as soon as possible.

This is notice that your payment information is stored by either us or one of our third-party payment processing applications.

Why do we store your payment information?

To make our services as convenient for you as possible, to reduce the number of unpaid accounts, and to provide the fastest, least obtrusive services to you, all of which helps us to keep our prices competitive, all services are automatically paid for when the services are complete.

Upon completion of your services from us, you will receive a receipt that includes the service(s) provided, the amount charged to your payment method, and the date of the service. Photos of the completed work, along with past charges to your payment method, will be available in your online portal. Your payment information is charged automatically when this receipt is generated. See our Terms and Conditions for more information on payment processing.

Lawn care companies tend to charge their client through three techniques: 1) Have the client prepay for services before they are provided. 2) Invoice the client to be paid later. 3) Receive payment in the form of cash, check, or credit from the client when services are complete.

We feel our payment processing technique is superior to prepayment, invoicing for post-payment, and collecting payment in the form of a check, cash, or credit card swipe. Prepayment credits are difficult to track by you and the company providing the services. This is an extra layer of labor for us, and an extra “moving part” that can cause you an overcharge.

Invoicing after services are provided is costly to any company in many ways. It takes time and labor to create, send, and follow up with invoices. If you forget to pay an invoice, it may interrupt your next service, which could incur late fees, penalties, and surcharges for overgrown grass.

Perhaps the most popular means lawn care providers use to receive payment is to collect cash, check, or swipe a credit card in a mobile POS after completing the job. This is inconvenient for you because it requires your time to either meet with your lawn care provider to pay them at the time services are provided, or it requires you to remember to leave payment somewhere your lawn care company can easily locate it, which poses the threat of theft. Further inconvenience arrises for you if you forget to leave payment, or you will feel the need to remain at your home until the lawn care company arrives to provide services.

Collecting payment from you in person is inconvenient for us because it takes extra time for us to retrieve the payment, or track down payment if you are not home or forgot to leave payment. Therefor, we’ve discovered, along with a growing number of other truly professional lawn services, that it’s better for the client and better for the lawn company to store payment information and charge your account automatically when the services have been completed. There’s nothing for you to do with this system.

How we protect against fraud

Beyond storing your payment information with secure, third-party payment processing applications, when allowed, invoices are closely monitored to reduce the risk of fraud from within our own company. Other than locally stored paper forms, which we almost never use, no one at Uncle Onion’s Lawn Service, LLC has access to your account information. Our employees do not and will never collect payment, so all payments are made directly to the company.

We recognize there is still room for fraud to occur. As of the date of this Document, Uncle Onion’s Lawn Service, LLC is solely operated by one person, the owner Aaron Johnson. If there is fraudulent activity on your account from Uncle Onion’s Lawn Service, LLC, he is the only person with access to your account, unless fraud is being perpetrated from an outside source.

We know this company is going to grow quickly, so we have already implemented and put in place procedures to protect our clients and our employees. Before the first employee is hired, we already have a strict Quality Assurance program in place to ensure our employees are providing you with the best, most honest service possible.

All of our lawn care technicians cary a mobile device and use an application that closely tracks and monitors their progress. Upon arriving to your address, they sign in to your job, then take a photo. Upon completion of the service, the technician takes another photo showing the completed work. When they sign out of the job, your work is marked complete and an invoice is automatically generated. This initiates the payment process at the same time as sending you a receipt. The receipt contains our phone number, website, and email address so you can contact us with any concerns about charges on your account.

This process is in use right now with just one service provider working for the company.

See our Terms and Conditions for information about our specific services, disputes, weather policies, and cancelation and rescheduling policies.