What happens to your document

This is the plain-language version of what happens to a document you send. The privacy policy is the formal one; where they differ, the formal one governs, but they should not differ, and if they do, tell us.

Before it leaves your device

Your browser opens the file and prepares it before anything is sent. Two things happen in that step that are worth knowing.

The file is prepared here, on your device, whatever format it arrived in. A PDF from the bank, a scan, a photograph off a phone: the browser reads it and hands over something plain. Some formats a server cannot read at all, so the work has to happen on your side either way.

The camera data is removed here too, and never reaches us. A photograph of a receipt carries the coordinates of where it was taken, usually a kitchen table or an office, along with the date and the model of phone. What we receive is the page and nothing else. We are not deleting that data carefully; we never have it.

On our server

The prepared document is written to a folder named by a long random string, kept for 30 days, and then deleted. The address of that folder cannot be guessed or counted up to from somebody else's, and the web is denied the folder itself.

We keep the page for those days rather than throwing it away at once for one reason: so it can sit beside the row read out of it while you check the figures. That is the whole purpose of keeping it, and when the days run out it goes.

Where it goes

Nowhere, today. No reading service is connected, and no document has been sent to anybody. That is a fact about now, not a promise: turning a page into rows needs a machine that reads it, and that machine will be somebody else's.

When one is connected, this page will name the company and the country it sits in, and the privacy policy will say what it is allowed to keep. Both will be written here before the first document goes out, not after. We would rather show you an unfinished page than a finished-looking one that is not true.

What we do not do with it

We do not show it to anybody else, use it as an example, publish it, or train anything on it. Nobody at legal name looks at your documents as a matter of course, only if you write to us about one and ask us to.

It is not only about you

An invoice names a supplier. A statement names whoever you paid. Those are other people's details, printed on a page you are entitled to hold, and we treat them the same way as yours: read, held for the days above, deleted by the clock, shown to nobody, and never used to build a picture of anybody.

If you would rather it did not

Then this service will not be for you, and we would rather say so than take your money and hope you do not mind. Once a reading service is connected there will be no way to use this without the page going to it: that step is the service.

You can, of course, close your account at any time and everything goes with it.

What comes back

The rows and the Excel book are yours: your own figures, read back to you. Use them anywhere, no credit needed. We claim nothing over them.