In short: we collect what we need to run the service, we don't sell it or use it for advertising, our staff can't open your workspace unless you invite them in, and you can export or delete your data at any time.
Who we are
Books Machine is operated by Halide Works, a trade name of David Torcivia LLC, a New York limited liability company ("Halide Works", "we", "us"). This policy covers booksmachine.com, the application at app.booksmachine.com, our emails, and the Books Machine API and assistant connection (together, the "Service").
Your data and your clients' data
We play two roles, and the difference matters.
- For your account, meaning your name, sign-in details and subscription, we decide how the data is used. We are the controller, and this policy applies.
- For what you put in a workspace, such as your clients, invoices, payments, bills, receipts, bank statements and the people in them, you decide how it is used. The workspace owner is the controller and we are the processor. We handle that data only to provide the Service, under our Data Processing Addendum. If you are a client of a Books Machine customer and have a question about your information, please contact that business first. We will help them respond.
What we collect
Account and sign-in
Your name, email address and password (stored only as a salted hash). Passkey registrations (a public key and a device label) and authenticator-app settings. Active sessions with their IP address, browser and times. If you choose to sign in with Google or GitHub, we receive your name, email address, profile picture link and account identifier from that provider. The access tokens it issues are stored encrypted, and identity tokens are not kept.
Workspace content
Everything you and your team enter or upload: business details, clients and vendors, quotes, invoices, credit notes, payments and refunds, recurring schedules, the chart of accounts and journal, bank statement files you import, receipts and other documents, notes, and the emails the Service sends for you along with their delivery status. When one of your clients authorizes automatic card payments, the workspace keeps a record of that consent, including the client's IP address. This is processed on your behalf, as described above.
Payments
Subscriptions are sold by Polar, which acts as merchant of record. Polar collects your payment details; we receive your plan, subscription status, amount, currency and Polar's customer identifiers, never your card number. If you connect your own Stripe account to take card payments from your clients, card entry happens on Stripe's own pages. We store the Stripe identifiers needed to charge a saved card and show its brand and last four digits. We never see or store full card numbers.
Usage and security records
Counts used to apply plan limits (for example, emails sent per day). An audit log of significant actions in each workspace and on the platform. Limited error records containing a request identifier, the method, the path with any secret tokens removed, and a shortened error message, never request bodies, cookies or query strings. IP addresses are recorded with sign-in sessions, in rate-limit counters and in abuse-detection flags such as bursts of sign-ups.
Communications
Messages you send us, and whether you have opted out of product announcements.
The marketing site
booksmachine.com sets no cookies, runs no scripts and uses no analytics. Our hosting provider keeps standard request logs for security and reliability.
How we use it
| Purpose | Legal basis (where GDPR or UK GDPR applies) |
|---|---|
| Providing the Service: accounts, workspaces, documents, emails and payments you ask for | Performance of our contract with you |
| Keeping the Service secure: sign-in, verification, rate limiting, abuse detection, audit logs | Legitimate interests in protecting our customers and the Service |
| Billing and plan limits | Performance of contract |
| Service messages: verification, password resets, security notices, changes to these terms | Performance of contract |
| Product announcements to workspace owners, with a one-click unsubscribe in every email | Legitimate interests; you can object at any time |
| Fixing problems and improving reliability, using error records and aggregate usage counts | Legitimate interests |
| Meeting legal obligations such as tax records and lawful requests | Legal obligation |
We do not sell personal information, rent it, use it for advertising, or use your workspace content to train machine-learning models.
What our staff can see
Our administrators can see account and workspace metadata needed to run the Service: names and email addresses of account holders, workspace names, plan and billing status, member lists, and aggregate counts such as how many invoices or receipts a workspace holds. They cannot open the contents of a workspace.
If you want our help inside your books, a workspace owner can grant support access for one hour, one day or seven days, and revoke it at any time. Support sessions are read-only, last at most fifteen minutes each, and are recorded in the workspace's audit log. Outside a grant, we would access workspace content only if legally compelled or to stop an active threat to the Service's security, and we will tell you if we do unless the law forbids it.
Cookies and local storage
The application uses only strictly necessary cookies: a session cookie that keeps you signed in, and short-lived cookies that carry a sign-in challenge (two-factor, passkey, or Google or GitHub sign-in) or carry an invite code or workspace invitation through sign-up. Cookies are limited to the host that set them. Your browser's local storage remembers your light or dark theme and which announcements you have dismissed. We use no advertising, analytics or third-party tracking cookies, so there is nothing to consent to and no banner.
Who we share it with
We use a small number of service providers to run Books Machine, listed on our Subprocessors page with what each does. They process data only on our instructions. Beyond them, we share personal information only:
- with services you connect yourself, such as your Stripe account, your own email provider, or an AI assistant you connect with a workspace key, which receives whatever it requests using that key under your agreement with its provider;
- with the people you invite into a workspace, according to the role you give them;
- when required by law, after checking that a request is valid and narrowing it where we can;
- to a successor if Books Machine is sold or merged, under this policy's protections, with notice to you.
Where it is stored
Books Machine runs on Cloudflare's infrastructure. Data is primarily stored and processed in the United States and may be processed in other countries where our providers operate. When personal data from the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom or Switzerland is transferred, we rely on the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses and the UK addendum, as set out in our Data Processing Addendum.
How long we keep it
| Data | Kept |
|---|---|
| Workspace content | Until you delete it or the workspace. A deleted workspace can be restored for 14 days, then it, its files and the backups we hold are permanently deleted. Copies you mirrored to your own storage are yours to delete, and residual copies in our hosting provider's recovery systems expire within 30 days. |
| Workspace backups | For the retention period the workspace owner chooses, and removed with the workspace. |
| Your account | Until you delete it. Deletion takes effect after a 7-day grace period, during which signing in cancels it. |
| Personal data exports | Download links expire and files are deleted after 7 days. |
| Sessions | Expire after 30 days without use, or sooner when you sign out or revoke them. |
| IP addresses | Rate-limit counters are deleted after 24 hours without activity. Session records, with their IP address and browser, are deleted 30 days after the session expires. IP addresses in abuse flags are removed 90 days after the flag is resolved, and after one year at most. |
| Error records | 30 days. |
| Audit logs | For the life of the workspace or platform. When you delete your account, name and email fields are removed from platform audit entries; the entries, including your internal user ID, remain as a security record. |
| Billing records | As long as tax and accounting law requires. Polar keeps its own records as merchant of record. |
Security
Traffic is encrypted in transit. Each workspace's records live in their own database, separate from other customers'. Credentials you store, such as Stripe and email keys, are encrypted at rest. The application does not display them after they are saved; workspace owners and admins can read them back through the API, and every read is logged. Sign-in supports passkeys and authenticator apps, and sensitive actions ask for recent verification. No system is perfectly secure; if a breach affects your personal data, we will notify you and the relevant authorities as the law requires.
Your rights
Depending on where you live, you can ask to access, correct, delete, restrict or object to our use of your personal data, and to receive it in a portable format. Much of this is self-service: Personal settings lets you export your personal data and delete your account, and workspace owners can export or delete a whole workspace. For anything else, email privacy@booksmachine.com. We will verify your identity, then respond within one month (or the period your law sets). If you are in the EEA, UK or Switzerland, you may also complain to your data protection authority.
US state privacy rights
Residents of California and other states with comprehensive privacy laws have the right to know what personal information we collect and how we use it (described above), and to request access, correction and deletion. We do not sell personal information or share it for cross-context behavioral advertising, and we do not use sensitive personal information to infer characteristics about you. We will not treat you differently for exercising these rights. You may use an authorized agent, and we may ask you to confirm the request directly. If we decline a request, you can appeal by replying to our decision.
Children
Books Machine is a service for businesses and is not directed to anyone under 18. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children.
Changes
If we make a material change, we will email everyone with an active account and post a notice in the application at least 30 days before it takes effect. The date at the top shows the current version.
Contact
Privacy questions and requests: privacy@booksmachine.com.
Everything else: hello@booksmachine.com.
Halide Works, New York.