Terms of Service

What these terms cover

These terms govern this website, the client portal, and the books assistant. They do not replace your engagement letter. Where an engagement letter exists and says something different about the bookkeeping work itself, the engagement letter wins.

The price you see here

The calculator produces an estimate from the answers you give it. It is an honest estimate, not a quote — the price we can commit to is the one in your engagement letter, once we have seen the actual state of your books. If what we find differs materially from what the answers described, we will tell you before starting, not afterwards on an invoice.

The books assistant

What it is

Where your engagement includes it, you can ask questions about your own bookkeeping in a Slack channel and receive answers, and request reports as CSV, Excel, or PDF files. Figures in an answer come from reports pulled from your accounting system at the moment you ask.

What it is not

It is not tax advice, legal advice, or an audited or reviewed financial statement. Do not file anything, sign anything, or make a decision that turns on a number, on the strength of an assistant answer alone. Ask us. Answers reflect what is in your books, and are only as accurate as the bookkeeping behind them — a question asked mid-period, before reconciliation, will be answered from unreconciled data.

Who can use it

Access is granted to a Slack channel, not to named individuals. Anyone in that channel can ask about your books and read the answers. Managing who is in the channel is your responsibility, and it is the whole of the access decision. If someone joins your channel, they can see your finances; if you remove them, they cannot. Tell us and we will disconnect a channel at any time.

By default the assistant will not disclose individual compensation — salaries, hourly rates, what a named person earns. It will still answer who is on your payroll. If you want that default changed for your account, it takes a written request from you.

Our access to your books

The assistant only reads. If you engage us to categorise your transactions, the system also writes — but only what someone in your Slack channel has approved: the account a transaction is coded to, transfers between your own accounts, and receipts attached to transactions. It never creates invoices or bills, pays anyone, or moves money. You can revoke our access from inside QuickBooks, Xero or Zoho Books at any time without asking us. If you do, we can no longer do your bookkeeping from that point; your engagement agreement says how that month is treated.

Reasonable use

Each question costs us real money to answer. Ordinary business use is what the service is priced for. Automated querying, resale of access, or using the channel as a bulk data export are not, and we may suspend the assistant — not your bookkeeping — if that happens. We would raise it with you first.

Your responsibilities

• Give us accurate information, and keep your contact details current.
• Control who is in your Slack channel and who can reach your email.
• Tell us promptly if you think someone has access who should not.
• Keep your own records. We are not your only copy.

Availability

We aim to keep the service running and will not pretend to guarantee it. It depends on services we do not control — QuickBooks, Slack, our hosting provider — and any of them can be unavailable. The assistant is a convenience layer over your books; when it is down, your books are unaffected and we are still reachable by phone and email.

Liability

Nothing here limits liability for fraud, or for anything that cannot lawfully be limited. Subject to that, and to the extent the law allows, our liability arising from the website or the assistant is limited to the fees you paid us in the twelve months before the claim, and we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, or for lost profits.

Liability for the bookkeeping work itself is dealt with in your engagement letter, not here.

Text messages

You can text us, and we will text you back. If you have asked us to, we will also send you appointment reminders. We do not send marketing texts. Message frequency varies, and message and data rates may apply — we do not charge for texts, but your carrier may.

Reply STOP to any message to stop all of them, or HELP for help. Opting out does not affect your engagement with us. Carriers are not liable for delayed or undelivered messages, so please do not rely on text for anything time-critical.

The full terms for text messaging, including the three ways consent is given and how it is recorded, are on the Text Messaging Terms & Consent page, which forms part of these terms.

Ending it

You can stop using the site and the assistant whenever you like, and disconnect your books from inside QuickBooks. Termination of the underlying engagement is governed by your engagement letter. When an engagement ends we disconnect the books and revoke channel access; the audit record of questions asked is retained as described in the Privacy Policy.

Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Washington, United States, and the courts of that state have exclusive jurisdiction.

Changes

We may update these terms. The date at the top says when. If a change materially affects clients, we will email rather than rely on you re-reading this page.