Help

Data protection and your AI

Octobooks meets UK GDPR and EU GDPR, and your books are hosted in Germany. You decide what your own AI may see.

What your AI may see

In Settings, Your AI, you choose one of three settings. It holds for every tool of the connector and for the REST API:

• Standard (the default): covered by data protection agreements. Your AI sees the books as you do. Our agreements, and those of your AI provider, set how your data is used.
• Careful: names covered up before the AI sees them. Staff and private customers, contact persons and suppliers who are people appear as pseudonyms such as Customer-K7Q2M; their emails, addresses, phone numbers, NI numbers and bank details are left out. When your AI uses a pseudonym, Octobooks puts the real name back on its own server, so it still books, invoices and answers for that person.
• Private: no personal data reaches the AI. Your AI works on figures, accounts and company suppliers; names of people and their details are replaced by "(left out)". You handle anything with a person's name in the web app.

Under Careful and Private, files and exports (PDFs, Excel files, the full backup) stay in the web app: a file cannot be covered up. In the web app you see everything, as before.

Behind the setting, under Per kind of data, you can also close bank lines, payroll, contacts or documents to your AI (Ask each time or Never).

How to change it

1. Sign in at app.octobooks.ai.
2. Open Settings and go to Your AI, AI privacy.
3. Choose Standard, Careful or Private.
4. Press Save. Your AI follows it from its next call.

Only the owner of the account changes this setting.

Payroll data

Standard: your AI reads payroll like the rest of the books. Careful: your staff appear as pseudonyms and their NI numbers and bank details are left out; the figures stay. Private: payroll is closed to your AI, and you run payroll in the web app.

What your AI provider receives

Octobooks itself sends your books to no AI provider. What your own AI reads goes to its provider under your agreement with them, so its terms apply to what it sees. We do not use your data to train AI models, and we do not sell it.

Keeping records and deleting them

Tax law makes you keep your accounting records for a set time:

• UK companies: 6 years from the end of the last company financial year they relate to (GOV.UK).
• Germany: 10 years for books, inventories and annual accounts, 8 years for accounting vouchers, 6 years for other tax documents (§ 147 (3) AO).
• Austria: 7 years for books, records and vouchers (§ 132 (1) BAO).

Your books stay while your account is open. Before you leave, download everything in one archive and keep it for these years yourself. After you close the account, the books stay 90 days for export, then they are deleted; backups roll off within a further 12 months.

Agreement and sub-processors

• The data processing agreement is part of our terms and covers every account.
• The sub-processors: Hetzner (servers in Germany, the second encrypted backup copy in Finland), Paddle (payments) and Google Workspace (our email).
• How we handle data in the app: App privacy.

Feedback, questions, want a feature? hello@octobooks.ai

Octobooks Ltd, 17549566, London