Privacy Policy

The Application is used by the Firm’s staff to run the Firm’s practice. It is not a service members of the public sign up for, and no one outside the Firm holds an account in it. This policy nonetheless covers two groups of people, because information about both passes through the Application:

• The Firm’s staff — the people who sign in and use it. The sections on account information, storage and security apply to them.
• The Firm’s clients, and the individuals whose financial records a client asks the Firm to work with — they do not use the Application, but their accounting information, and where they choose to connect one their bank-account information, is read and in places stored by it. The sections on QuickBooks Online data, bank account connections, retention and deletion apply to them.

Where a choice or a request is described below, it belongs to whichever of those two groups the information is about.

• Account information — the name, email address, and role of authorized staff, used for sign-in and access control.
• Firm and client operational data — the scheduling, workload, and pricing information the Firm enters to run its practice.
• QuickBooks Online data — when a QuickBooks company is connected, the information described in the section below.
• Bank account information — only if you connect a bank or credit-card account, as described below. The Application does not do this today.

With authorization, the Application connects to QuickBooks Online through Intuit’s APIs. It reads:

• company information (company name and fiscal year-end);
• the chart of accounts, to count bank and credit-card accounts;
• the number of active employees;
• counts of transactions over a recent period, to estimate monthly transaction volume;
• individual transaction detail — general-ledger lines (date, amount, account, tax code, reconciliation status, currency), bills and expenses, and the files already attached to them — to check whether the books are complete and accurate;
• sales-tax reports (such as GST/HST summaries), to review a tax filing before it is made.

With authorization, and only on an instruction from the Firm’s staff, the Application also writes a limited set of changes back to your QuickBooks company:

• it attaches a receipt or other supporting document to a bill or expense;
• it changes the expense account or tax code recorded on a line of a bill or expense, to correct how a transaction is categorized;
• it creates a bill or expense from a receipt, where that purchase is not already recorded in your books — using only vendors and accounts that already exist in your QuickBooks.

It makes no other changes: it does not void or delete anything, it does not create vendors or accounts, and it does not touch invoices, payments, or payroll. Every such change is initiated by a named member of the Firm’s staff, is confirmed by them before it is sent, and is recorded in the Application’s own audit log.

We use this information to estimate bookkeeping workload, to price or re-price engagements, and to check the accuracy and completeness of the books we maintain for you. We store:

• the OAuth tokens needed to maintain the connection;
• the connected company’s name and identifier;
• aggregate counts (such as number of accounts, number of employees, and an estimated monthly transaction count);
• a record of every change the Application made to your QuickBooks company — which transaction, what was changed, the value before and after, the name of the file attached, who made it, when, and the reference number QuickBooks returned for it. We keep this so the Firm can always account for what it changed in your books.
• the as-filed record of a sales-tax return we prepared or reviewed for you — the return’s figures as they stood when it was filed, the period and basis they cover, and the individual transactions identified as affecting a filed period. We keep this because QuickBooks stops being able to report what was filed once a period closes, and the Firm may have to evidence a filing years later;
• any exception amounts a member of the Firm’s staff entered while reviewing a return, with the return line they apply to and the note explaining them;
• which of your QuickBooks accounts were selected for a purpose — for example the accounts counted toward transaction volume, and the accounts included in a reconciliation or a review report — and the date through which your accounts were last reconciled;
• the amount the Firm has billed you over the last twelve months. This is read from the Firm’s own QuickBooks company, not yours, and is used to price and re-price your engagement.

Transaction detail is read to produce those figures and the reviews described above. Beyond the records listed above, we do not retain copies of your ledgers or financial statements, and we keep no general copy of your transactions — the transaction-level detail we keep is limited to the record of changes we made and the transactions identified as affecting a filed sales-tax return. We do not keep a copy of an attached receipt or supporting document after it has been passed to QuickBooks; we keep only its file name, a digital fingerprint of it, and the reference QuickBooks returned. We do not sell or share your QuickBooks data with third parties.

The Application does not connect to bank accounts today. This section is published ahead of that capability so it can be read before any bank connection is made; this sentence is removed when the capability goes live.

When it is available, the Firm may ask you to connect a bank or credit-card account so the Firm can obtain the transaction records it needs to keep your books. That connection is made through a regulated bank-data provider, on a page the provider hosts:

• you enter your online-banking credentials on the provider’s page. The Firm never sees, receives, or stores your banking username, password, or security answers;
• the provider returns to the Application an access credential for the connection, together with the account and transaction information you authorized it to share — typically the account name, type, and last digits, and each transaction’s date, amount, description, and merchant;
• the Application uses that information only to keep and check the books the Firm maintains for you. We do not sell or share it with third parties, and we do not use it for advertising;
• the Application makes no changes to any bank account: it does not move money, initiate payments, or alter anything at your financial institution;
• you may end a bank connection at any time by telling the Firm; on disconnection we delete the stored access credential for that connection, as we do for QuickBooks;
• the provider is named in this policy, with a link to its own privacy notice, when a connection first becomes available.

You may disconnect a QuickBooks company at any time from within the Application; on disconnection we delete the stored OAuth tokens for that company.

We keep the remaining information for a period that depends on what it is:

• Sign-in and access records — for as long as a person is authorized to use the Application, and afterwards for as long as the Firm needs them to account for who did what.
• Scheduling, workload, and pricing information — for as long as the Firm’s engagement with the client continues, and afterwards for the period the Firm is required to keep its professional records.
• The record of changes the Application made to your QuickBooks company, and the as-filed record of a sales-tax return — indefinitely, and by design. These exist so the Firm can always account for what it changed in your books and what it filed on your behalf, and they are never altered after they are written. Expiring them would defeat the reason they are kept.
• Receipts and other supporting documents — not retained at all. Their contents pass through to QuickBooks; the Application keeps only the file name, a digital fingerprint of the file, and the reference QuickBooks returned.

We review this policy and the periods above at least once a year, and after any change to what the Application collects. The effective date at the top reflects the most recent review.

You may request deletion of information associated with you or a connected company by contacting us. We will delete what we can and tell you what we cannot — the two records described above as retained by design are kept even after a deletion request, because they are the Firm’s own account of work it performed.