Your own keys
Asphalt OS talks to a few outside services on your company's behalf. Each company enters its own keys (the account details those services give you) on Connections, one card per service, and nothing is shared between companies. Asphalt OS works from day one without any of them; each one switches on one more thing.
| Card | What it does | Until it is connected |
|---|---|---|
| Sending email and texts | Captured (a new company starts here) keeps everything in: email goes to the test mailbox and texts stay in the outbox. Live sends them for real. | Nothing reaches a customer. |
| Email sending (SMTP) | The mail service your company email goes out through when sending is live: Google Workspace, Microsoft 365 or any SMTP service. Your brand address becomes Reply-To. | Emails are held back and reach nobody. |
| Texting (Twilio) | Sends and receives texts from your company's number. One number belongs to one company. See Messages and texting. | No texts go out. |
| Company mailbox | Google Workspace or Microsoft 365: new email in your mailbox lands in the shared inbox. The refresh token comes from a one-time consent step that lets Asphalt OS read the mailbox. For replies sent from Asphalt OS to be copied into the mailbox's own Sent folder (the owner's switch on the inbox's Rules page), take a new token from a second consent step that also grants adding letters to it: Google's gmail.insert, or Microsoft 365's Mail.ReadWrite with an administrator's consent. See What only the owner switches on. | No new mail comes in from the mailbox. |
| Payments (Stripe) | Your own Stripe account: when a customer pays an invoice online, the money goes straight to it. Asphalt OS never holds money and never sees a card number. Start with Stripe's test keys and switch to the live keys when you are ready. See Invoices. | No online checkout: invoices say how to pay by check or bank transfer. |
| TruTec measuring | Measures a property from the air for an estimate. The real TruTec connection is not built yet. | Measurements are simulated and say so. Type the size yourself. |
| QuickBooks Online | Your Intuit developer app. See QuickBooks import. | Import a QuickBooks export instead. |
| Ask Asphalt (Anthropic) | The AI behind the chat, and behind the shared inbox's AI assistant. See Ask Asphalt and The AI assistant. | The snapshot shows, the chat doesn't; the inbox works without its AI. |
| Call transcription | Turns call recordings into text. See Calls. | Type or paste the transcript. |
| Weather | Forecasts and warnings over your scheduled job sites from the National Weather Service: free, no key, but it receives each job site's location and asks for a contact email. | A built-in sample forecast, and nothing leaves the building. |
| Address lookup | Turns plant and job-site addresses into map points with the US Census lookup: free, no key, but it receives the addresses. | A built-in stand-in, and nothing leaves the building. |
| Your website's form | The form code for your own website, and its key: a visitor who fills the form in is a lead in Intake within seconds, with the campaign the page carried. See Your website's form. | Leads from the website are typed in by hand from the emails it sends you. |
Each card with a harmless check has a Test button, and the answer is always a plain sentence. A new key is used right away.
Who can change them
- Only the CEO and the Asphalt OS staff role can open the page.
- Saving a key asks for your password again.
- Most settings are the owner's alone: switching email and texts to Live (and back), anything on the Email sending, Company mailbox, Texting, Payments and QuickBooks cards, and the Ask Asphalt, transcription and TruTec keys. When someone else saves one of those, nothing changes yet: the owner gets a task, and the change waits at the top of the Connections page under Waiting for your approval, where the owner approves or declines it in one click (after typing their password again). One change waits per setting (saving again replaces it), and whoever asked can take it back with Take it back. The weather and address-lookup choices the Asphalt OS staff may set right away.
- The owner is emailed about every change on this page, whoever made it: which setting, who, and when. Never the value. A change outside business hours also raises an alert.
Keys stay hidden
A key can be written, never read back. Once saved, the page shows only that it is set and how it ends, for example "Set, ends in 4f2a". Nobody sees the whole key again, not even the person who typed it. To change it, type a new one.
Each feature reads only its own service's key, and only for the person using it: the app server reads the Ask Asphalt, transcription, TruTec, weather and address-lookup keys for the person's own feature and nothing for a crew member. The mail service's, the mailbox's, Twilio's, Stripe's and QuickBooks' keys are read only by the background worker, which does the sending, the syncing and the payments; so is the Anthropic key when the shared inbox's AI uses it, which only the worker ever calls. The app server keeps no copy of any key.