Privacy

This describes what happens to your data in Books Always Ready. It is written to match what the software does. Where something is a limitation rather than a promise, it says so.

What is stored

The transactions from the CSV files you upload: date, description, amount, the category assigned to each one, and any notes you add while reviewing. Your business name, your fiscal year start, and your CPA email address if you enter one. The quarterly packets you generate, including the PDF itself, and the draft emails attached to them.

Your sign-in details are held by Clerk, our authentication provider. We store your Clerk user ID so we know which books are yours. We never see or store your password.

Payment details are handled entirely by Stripe. Card numbers never reach this application. We store your Stripe customer and subscription IDs and your subscription status, so we know whether your account is active.

What we never ask for

We do not connect to your bank. There is no bank login, no Plaid connection, no read access to your accounts. The only way transactions enter this app is a CSV file you export and upload yourself. That is a deliberate limitation: it means a compromise of this service cannot reach your bank.

Who else sees your transactions

Categorization uses Anthropic's API. When a quarter is categorized, the description and amount of each transaction are sent to Anthropic to be sorted into your chart of accounts. Your business name, your CPA's email address, and your identity are not sent. Anthropic states that API inputs are not used to train their models.

If you send a packet to your CPA, the email and the attached PDF go through Resend, our email provider, to the address you entered. Nothing is sent until you press send.

Those three (Clerk, Stripe, Anthropic) plus Resend when you send, and the hosting and database providers that run the service, are the only parties involved. We do not sell your data, share it with advertisers, or use it to build any product other than the one you are paying for.

Getting your data out

Settings has an export button. It gives you everything: your full ledger as a CSV you can open in a spreadsheet, and a JSON file with your business details, chart of accounts, transactions, and packet history. Packet PDFs download individually from the Packets page.

Export is not gated on your subscription. If you stop paying, your books stay readable and downloadable. Only creating new work (uploading a new quarter, building a new packet) requires an active subscription.

Deleting your data

Settings has a delete button. It removes your business, every transaction, every packet and PDF, and every draft email. If you have an active subscription it is cancelled first, and if that cancellation fails nothing is deleted, so you are never left paying for records that no longer exist.

Deleting your books does not delete your sign-in account, so you can start again. To remove that too, ask us.

How long it is kept

Until you delete it. Bookkeeping records are worth keeping across years, so nothing expires on its own.

Contact

Questions about any of this, or a request we have not built a button for, go to wes@practicalsystems.io.

See also the terms.