FR BOOKS ® LTD (“we”, “us”, “our”) take security and privacy seriously. This Privacy Policy explains how we collect, store and use personal data when you browse www.frbooks.co.uk or www.frbooks.co.uk (the “FR BOOKS website”), use the FR Books application (“FR BOOKS”) or otherwise provide your personal data to us. Please read this Privacy Policy carefully to understand how we will treat your personal data.
This Privacy Policy should be read together with our User Agreement , which together apply to your use of the FR BOOKS website and FR BOOKS.
When we say your “personal data”, we mean any information that identifies any person, that you provide to us during your trial period, after you subscribe, or that is contained in any other information that you provide to us (or that you authorise a third party to give to us on your behalf).
Your “personal data” may also be contained in information that we collect about you in connection with your use of the FR BOOKS website and/or FR BOOKS. The financial data that you enter into FR BOOKS, or that is provided to FR BOOKS from your bank, isn’t part of the “personal data” discussed here, unless it identifies a person – for more information about your financial data, jump ahead to the next section. When it comes to your personal data, we comply with our obligations under the General Data Protection Regulation and any other applicable data protection legislation.
Information you provide – Your personal data includes the information you provide, or that you authorise someone else to provide, when you sign up for an account or sign up to receive our emails, or when you answer questionnaires, surveys, enter competitions or provide information in your account profile, on the FR BOOKS website, or during a support enquiry about you and/or your organisation. It also includes information you provide when you complete any forms which you submit to us. It also includes information you upload to your FR BOOKS account.
Examples of this personal data include your name, your email address, contact and/or employee names; and any correspondence when you contact us. It could also include your bank account details and bank transaction details (if it identifies a person). It could also include details in any invoices or receipts that you upload (if they identify a person).
We do not collect or process special categories of personal data, as defined under GDPR. Also, we do not knowingly collect or solicit any personal data from anyone under the age of sixteen or knowingly allow such persons to register for FR BOOKS. FR BOOKS is not directed at children under the age of sixteen. In the event that we learn that we have collected personal data from a child under age sixteen without verification of parental consent, we will delete that information as quickly as possible.
Information we collect – We collect information about your website usage, to improve our service and to understand trends to enhance and customise content and advertisements. Some of this data may be “personal data”, where it identifies a person. Here’s the information that we collect and how we use it:
Information Others Provide to Us – We may receive information from others (e.g. your bank) that you have authorised that third party to provide to us. This could include the initial information to enable us to create your account (e.g. your full name, your email address and your business type) and also your bank transaction data.
In addition to your personal data, we will also hold financial data that you enter into FR BOOKS. Examples of your financial data include your organisation’s invoices, expenses, receipts and bank transactions.
You own all of the financial data you enter or upload into FR BOOKS and have ultimate control over who has access to it. For example, if you want to give your accountant access to your financial data, you can switch on their access in FR BOOKS and limit their permissions if you wish. Keep in mind, however, it is your job to safeguard your password and account access. You must also ensure that you have obtained any relevant consents or permissions necessary for you to upload any personal data to FR BOOKS and for it to be used as set out in this policy.
Providing FR BOOKS – We use your personal data to enable us to register you and provide you with access to FR BOOKS and the FR BOOKS website. It will also enable us to contact you by email, post, SMS, live chat, social media or telephone where necessary concerning FR BOOKS; to record your personal preferences; to personalise our services to you (such as by pre-populating fields to make it easier for you to provide information when you return to FR BOOKS or the FR BOOKS website). It will also enable us to produce reports you request as part of the services we provide, including regulatory reports and/or other reports. We may also validate your information (and, in some cases, match it against information that has been collected by a third party, for example Companies House) to check that the data we hold about our customers/users is accurate, consistent and current.
Should you choose to use parts of FR BOOKS that involve providing your personal and/or financial data to third parties (for example, if you choose to give your accountant or your bank access to your data), then your personal and/or financial data will be shared in that way. Such personal and / or financial data may include for example, general, financial and transactional data, and information from your account such as accounting balances, bank transactions and invoice, bill, expense and project details. These third parties will use that data in accordance with any consents you have given us or that you may give to us in the future.
We may use third parties to assist us in providing FR BOOKS from time to time, and in those cases may pass on your personal and/or financial data to them. In such cases we will only share your data with third parties that we trust, and where there are assurances in place as to how they will protect the data.
Improving FR BOOKS – We will also use and analyse your personal data and financial data so that we can administer, support, improve and develop our business, customer service and the features of the FR BOOKS website and FR BOOKS generally. We may use third parties to assist us in doing these things from time to time, and in those cases may pass on your personal and/or financial data to them. We will only share your data with third parties that we trust, and where there are assurances in place as to how they will protect the data.
Providing Insights – We monitor anonymous, aggregated information about account and financial data so that we can produce insights about small businesses finance. For example, based on an anonymous, aggregate data analysis, we may produce a white paper that reports how most small businesses are not paid on time. We may share these insights with customers, on our blog or other promotional material, use them internally to improve our product and communications, or share with other interested third parties. Just to be clear – we will never identify you or your business in such communications or white papers and will never report data in such a way that your business could be identified.
Contacting you for Marketing Purposes – We may use your personal data to contact you by email, post, SMS, live chat, social media and/or telephone to let you know about our other FR BOOKS services, content, offers or product ranges which may be of interest to you. We may also use your financial data to enable us to tailor these notifications (in order to make sure what we are sending you is relevant). We will only use your data in this way where you have provided consent, we have legitimate business reasons for doing so, or where we are otherwise entitled by law to do so. If you would like us to stop providing you with such notifications, simply click the ‘unsubscribe’ link at the bottom of the emails or contact us using the contact details below. Please note, this may take up to one working day to take effect. To stop receiving emails from FR BOOKS itself (for example, a reminder that your subscription is expiring), you should cancel your FR BOOKS account.
We may contact you if the specific arrangement we have in place with a third party which impacts you is changing and / or coming to an end and to let you know what will take place next.
Cookies – We may further use, or permit selected third parties to use, your personal data to enable us to track and analyse FR BOOKS website traffic and visitor trends, improve your browsing experience and to personalise and enhance the content and advertising we display.
Legal Requirements – We may use your personal data to comply with any legal obligations to which we are subject.
We shall periodically check that the personal data we store for you is accurate. If you would like to update the personal data we hold about you, please login to your FR BOOKS account or contact us at support@frbooks.co.uk
We collect and use your personal data for a variety of reasons. We need some data to enter into and perform our contract with you and provide you with access to FR BOOKS – for example your contact details and other information requested during the FR BOOKSsetup process. If you fail to provide such data we will be unable to provide our service to you.
Other information we collect because we have legitimate business interests, for example, in:
In some circumstances we may process your personal data because it is required for compliance with a legal or regulatory obligation.
You have the option within your account to share your data with people that you trust – for example, you can switch on account access for your accountant to see your financial data. We will not share your financial data with a third party unless you authorise it (by choosing to do so within FR BOOKS, or as detailed in this policy).
We will share your personal and financial data with third parties in certain circumstances:
We may also share your personal and financial data with third parties:
We also utilise a number of carefully selected third parties to help provide our services to you. Examples of these functions include email, providing marketing assistance and data analysis, data management, handling credit card transactions and providing customer service. In choosing to work with any such third parties, we will always ensure that the security policies and confidentiality arrangements of those third parties adhere to the same requirements we ourselves impose and expect, as a minimum. No ownership rights to the data will be transferred to any third party.
The data that we collect from you is currently stored on secure UK servers using Google Cloud.
You may grant third party access to your personal or financial data by enabling the FR BOOKS API for that third party. At all times, this access is controlled by you. FR BOOKS is not responsible for the privacy practices employed by any third party given access by you to your personal or financial data by the FR BOOKS API.
We only store your data for as long as necessary for the purposes of processing set out in this policy. When you cancel your account with FR BOOKS, you can either delete your data immediately, or we will automatically delete your data after a period of 8 years after the last date of inactivity in your account. We hold your data for 8 years as you may require it for Anti-Money Laundering purposes or in the event of an investigation from the tax authorities.
If you are signed up to marketing communications, cancelling your FR BOOKS account will cancel your marketing communication also.
To ensure the integrity of our systems and your data, we utilise various technologies to continually take secure, encrypted backups. Data remains archived within these backups and these are maintained according to our defined two-year data retention policy, after which they are removed.
You can export a copy of your data whenever you like – this will include your personal data and that of your clients, contacts and suppliers, your financial transactions, invoices, and expenses. We recommend that you use the export functionality to keep a backup of your data. While we regularly back up your data, we can’t restore backups on an individual basis.
You can also ask us for a copy of your personal data that we hold at any time, see section 10 below.
You have the option to delete all of your data at any time, using the “Cancel My Account” option in the profile settings in the main menu of FR BOOKS. You can use this option to reset FR BOOKS after loading test data during your free trial. After you delete your data you will have the option to restore it within 7 days. After this time your data will be lost permanently.
We highly recommend that you export your data before cancelling, since many countries require you retain your business records going back many years, even if you have finished trading.
If your free trial expires, your FR BOOKS subscription will convert to the free version of FR BOOKS. We will retain historical details about your payments to FR BOOKS for accounting purposes because we need to do so by law.
If you are using FR BOOKS Pro, once your free trial is over, you need to provide payment details to start your subscription and continue using FR BOOKS. This information is passed directly to our payment service provider (Stripe – https://stripe.com) over an encrypted link and is never stored on our system. We handle ongoing billing by passing a token to Stripe that identifies your account.
Cookies are small files saved to your device that track, save and store information as well as your interactions and usage of our services. The primary purpose for our use of cookies is to allow us to provide a smooth, efficient and personalised experience for our users both on and off our website through remembering your preferences, storing passwords if you request it and serving you more relevant advertising.
If you want to manage or disable cookies for the FR BOOKS website or any other site, you can do it by changing your browser settings. We suggest consulting the Help section of your browser or taking a look at the About Cookies website which offers guidance for all modern browsers.
We take security and privacy seriously. We will endeavour to take all reasonable steps to keep your personal and financial data secure once it has been transferred to our systems. We adopt appropriate, industry standard data collection, storage and processing practices and security measures to protect against unauthorised access, alteration, disclosure or destruction.
Where we utilise third parties to help provide our services, we will always ensure that the security policies and confidentiality arrangements of those third parties adhere to the same requirements we ourselves impose and expect, as a minimum.
Where we have given you (or where you have chosen) a password which enables you to access certain parts of the FR BOOKS website or FR BOOKS itself, you are responsible for keeping this password confidential. We ask you not to share your password with anyone.
Please note that the internet is not a secure medium and although we will do our best to protect your data, we cannot guarantee the security of any data transmitted to the FR BOOKS website or through FR BOOKS itself. Any transmission is at your own risk.
We may modify or update this Privacy Policy from time to time to reflect the changes in our business and practices, and so you should review this page periodically. It is your responsibility to monitor our Privacy Policy for changes but where there are material changes we will notify users.
If you have any queries relating to this Privacy Policy or FR BOOKS' use of your personal or financial data, please contact us; support@frbooks.co.uk, or by writing to us at 46B Vanburgh Park, London, SE3 7JQ.