In short
- BookSyncHQ reads your clients’ ledgers to verify them. It does not write to them, sell their data, advertise with it, or train AI models on it.
- Ledger credentials are exchanged and held server-side, encrypted, and deleted the moment you disconnect. Your browser never receives them.
- Where a feature uses an AI model, the relevant excerpt is processed by Anthropic under commercial terms that forbid training on it, and deleted by Anthropic within 30 days.
- Everything is stored in the United States. You can export or delete your data at any time.
The summary is a guide; the sections below are the policy.
Who we are and what this covers
BookSyncHQ is operated by Island Development Crew (“we”, “us”). This policy explains what information we collect when you use the BookSyncHQ website and service, how we use it, who we share it with, and the choices you have. It applies to booksynchq.vercel.app, booksynchq.com, and any subdomain or application that links to it.
BookSyncHQ is built for accounting and bookkeeping firms. When your firm connects a client’s ledger or uploads a client’s reports, your firm decides what data we process and why; for that client data we act as your service provider (a “processor”), and we use it only to provide the service to you. For information about you and your firm as our customer — your account, your contact details, your billing — we are responsible for it directly.
What we collect
Account and contact information. Your firm’s name, the names and email addresses of the people who use the service, the approximate number of clients you tell us about, and anything you send us when you request a design-partner seat or write to us.
Connected-ledger data. When you connect QuickBooks Online or Xero through the provider’s own consent screen, we receive an authorization grant (access and refresh tokens) and the identifier and name of the company or organisation you authorized. Using that grant, and only for the connections you authorize, we read the records a verification needs — for example the chart of accounts, trial balance, balance sheet, profit and loss, accounts receivable and payable aging, bank transactions, deposits, payments, and journal entries for the periods being verified.
Files you upload. Report exports you provide, such as a QuickBooks Desktop trial balance or aging report, and bank statements. Some tools on our site run entirely in your browser and say so on the page; files used by those tools are not uploaded to us.
Verification records. The results we produce from that data: the comparisons performed, differences found, exceptions and how they were resolved, who approved what and when, certificates, and the tamper-evident log that records each of these events.
Technical information. The IP address and browser details that reach our servers with each request, which our hosting provider records in short-lived operational logs, and short-lived counters keyed to IP address and sign-in code that we use only to block code-guessing.
Payment information. When you buy, Stripe collects your card or bank details directly. We receive a customer reference, the product purchased, and payment status — never your full card number.
How we use it
- To provide the service: connect ledgers, run the verifications you request, show you the results, and produce the workpapers and certificates you export.
- To keep it secure: authenticate you, refresh ledger authorizations before they lapse, rate-limit sign-in attempts, and investigate misuse.
- To support you, including verifications our team performs by hand at your request during the design-partner program.
- To bill you for what you buy.
- To run and improve the service using operational measurements — timings, error rates, counts of checks performed — that do not contain the contents of anyone’s books.
- To meet legal obligations.
We do not sell personal information or ledger data, share it for cross-context behavioral advertising, or use it to market anything to your clients. We do not use your data or your clients’ data to train AI or machine-learning models, and we do not permit our providers to.
Artificial intelligence
The comparisons at the heart of a verification — balances and transactions matched in integer cents — are performed by our own deterministic code, not by an AI model.
Some features use an AI model to help with what arithmetic cannot settle, such as drafting a plain-language explanation of why an account does not tie out. When you use one, the minimum excerpt the task requires is sent to Anthropic, PBC for processing under its commercial terms, which prohibit training models on that content. Anthropic deletes API inputs and outputs within 30 days unless they are flagged for a safety review or it is legally required to keep them. AI-drafted text is labelled as such, and nothing an AI model drafts changes a verification result or your ledger.
How we protect it
- All traffic is encrypted in transit with TLS, and browsers are instructed to use HTTPS only.
- Ledger access and refresh tokens are encrypted with AES-256-GCM before they are stored, using a key kept in our deployment’s secret configuration rather than in the database. They are used only by our servers and are never sent to your browser.
- The database is encrypted at rest by our database provider, and access to production systems is limited to the people who operate the service.
- Verification records are kept in a per-client, hash-chained log, so any later alteration or deletion of a record is detectable (tamper-evident).
- Sign-in codes are rate-limited by IP address and by code; sessions are signed and expire.
No system is perfectly secure. If we become aware of a breach affecting your data, we will notify you without undue delay and as required by law.
How long we keep it, and deleting it
- Ledger credentials: until you disconnect the ledger. Disconnecting revokes the authorization at Intuit or Xero and deletes the stored tokens immediately, and we stop retrieving data from that ledger.
- Retrieved ledger data, uploaded files, and verification records: for as long as your firm keeps them in the service, so your workpapers stay complete. You can delete a client’s data at any time; we delete everything within 30 days of your request or of your account closing.
- Account and billing records: for the life of the account, and afterwards as long as tax and accounting law requires.
- Operational logs and sign-in counters: for a short period, and never used for any purpose other than operating and securing the service.
Deleted data can persist in encrypted backups until our database provider’s backup cycle overwrites it.
Your choices and rights
You can ask us to show you, correct, export, or delete the personal information we hold about you by writing to partners@booksynchq.com; we answer within 30 days. Depending on where you live — including California, the EU, and the UK — you may have additional rights, such as to object to or restrict certain processing, to complain to a data-protection authority, and not to be treated differently for exercising any of these rights.
If you are a client of a firm that uses BookSyncHQ, your firm controls your data in the service; please direct requests to them first, and we will help them respond.
Where the EU or UK GDPR applies, we rely on performance of our contract with you, our legitimate interest in operating a secure and reliable service, compliance with law, and — where it is required — your consent.
Where it is stored
BookSyncHQ stores and processes data in the United States. If you use it from elsewhere, your data is transferred to the United States, and we rely on appropriate safeguards, such as standard contractual clauses, where the law requires them.
Children
BookSyncHQ is a professional service for businesses. It is not directed to anyone under 18, and we do not knowingly collect their information.
Changes to this policy
When we change this policy we will update the effective date above, and for material changes we will notify account holders by email before the change takes effect. We keep earlier versions and will send any of them on request.
Contact
Island Development Crew · partners@booksynchq.com