What this keeps about you, and why

Pickle is a prototype being tested with a small number of businesses and accountants. This page says exactly what it reads, what it keeps, who else touches it and how to have it deleted.

Who is responsible

Explore All Options Ltd is the data controller for Pickle. Write to charlie@sidequester.io about anything on this page, including any of the rights below.

What is read and not kept

• A bank or ledger file you upload is read in the request that carried it and thrown away. No transaction is ever stored.
• Transactions read from FreeAgent are read the same way: fetched, summarised and discarded on every read.
• Public records about a company you look up (the Companies House register, including officers’ names, and filed accounts) and the company’s own website are read when an audit runs. They are not stored against you.

What is kept, if you make an account

• Your account: your email address, an optional name, and a salted hash of your password (never the password itself). If you signed up through FreeAgent, FreeAgent’s identifier for your user.
• Businesses you add: the name, company number and website you give.
• What your books showed, if you upload a ledger or connect FreeAgent: summary figures such as estimated turnover and monthly money in, payroll totals and headcount, pension, subcontractor, vehicle, plant hire, premises and insurance spend, the names of insurers paid, the surnames on wage payments (so a director's own salary can be told apart from an employee's wage), and items that look like equipment purchases (description, price and date). Each carries the date it was true.
• A FreeAgent connection: an encrypted refresh token that lets this site read your books again, and nothing else. No access token is stored.
• What you tell it: items you add to your asset register (including serial numbers), corrections to how a payment was read, and the answers you type into a claim.
• For a practice: the client companies imported from FreeAgent (name, company number and FreeAgent’s reference for each) and which clients you have marked as called.
• Agent keys you create, stored as a hash.
• A sign-in session, stored as a hash, for 30 days.

What is kept without an account

• An early-access request or a kept estimate: the name, email address, phone number and company you type, so that a person can get back to you. Nothing is sent to you automatically.
• A one-way hash of your IP address, or of the email typed into a sign-in form, with a count of requests that minute, so that one caller cannot exhaust what everyone shares or guess passwords. Removed after a day.

Why, and on what basis

To run the audit you ask for and show you the result, which is the service you signed up for (contract), and to test whether this kind of audit is useful (legitimate interests). Nothing here is passed to an insurer, a broker or anyone else, and nothing is used for advertising. The output is a statement of demands and needs with illustrative prices, not advice and not a quote.

Who else handles it

• Cloudflare hosts the site and the database, which is held in Western Europe. Cloudflare keeps request logs (including IP addresses) under its own terms.
• FreeAgent, only if you connect it, under your own agreement with them.
• Companies House receives the company names and numbers looked up.

How long

Account data is kept until you delete the account. Expired sessions are removed nightly. Early-access requests and kept estimates are kept until the test ends or you ask for them to be removed.

Your rights

You can ask for a copy of what is held about you, have it corrected, object to its use, or have it deleted. Deleting is a button: signed in, go to your account and delete it, and everything above that belongs to it goes at once. If you connected FreeAgent, also remove this app’s approval in FreeAgent, which this site has no way to do for you. You can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office at ico.org.uk.

Cookies

Two, both strictly necessary and neither used for tracking: one that keeps you signed in, and a short-lived one that ties a FreeAgent approval to the browser that started it.