Privacy & Cookies
This document explains how [COMPANY LEGAL NAME] ("we", "us", "our"), operator of SharpPenny (the "Service"), handles your personal information, and how we use cookies. It is written to address the requirements that apply to users in Canada and the United States. It has two clearly separated parts:
Our core promise: nothing that identifies you leaves SharpPenny
We do not disclose data that can be attributed to you to any third party. "Third party" here explicitly includes artificial‑intelligence providers, AI agents, search services, and services that read text out of images. This is not a preference we may quietly change; it is the reason the Service exists in the form it does.
Before anything is sent to an outside service, it passes through what we call the identity gate. The gate removes the details that point to a person or a company — names, email addresses, phone numbers, postal addresses, your own business name, account and card numbers, reference numbers, and our own internal identifiers for you. What is left is a description of a transaction, not a description of you.
There are exactly two exceptions, both of which you switch on yourself and both of which are set out in full in Section 4: sending a receipt photograph to an outside reading service, and the business address search box. Nothing else is ever sent in a form that could be traced back to you.
Part A — Privacy Policy
1. Who we are and what this covers
SharpPenny is a personal and business finance application that lets you import, categorize, and analyze your financial records, receipts, budgets, and tax information. This policy covers personal information we collect through the Service. Our contact details are in Section 12.
2. Information we collect
- Account information: your email address, password (stored only as a secure hash), and profile/organization details.
- Financial information you provide or import: bank and card statements (CSV/PDF), transactions, receipts and their images, categories, budgets, business and tax details, and sales‑tax/GST data.
- Family information (optional feature): where you use the family budgeting feature, information about family members you add, including children, and their allowances, allocations, and comments.
- Connected accounts (optional): if you connect Gmail to import receipts, the specific messages/attachments you authorize us to access.
- Technical information: information needed to operate the Service securely, such as authentication session data and server logs.
3. How we use your information
- To provide the Service: importing, categorizing, and reporting on your finances, budgets, and taxes.
- To authenticate you and keep your account secure.
- To provide optional AI‑assisted features (see Section 4).
- To communicate with you about the Service and respond to your requests.
- To comply with legal obligations and protect against fraud or misuse.
In Canada we rely on your consent (and, where permitted, our legitimate business interests) to process your information. You may withdraw consent as described in Section 8.
4. Artificial intelligence and the identity gate
Several features use artificial intelligence: suggesting a category for a transaction, answering a question about a charge, reviewing a merchant name, and proposing a starting budget. All of them work from data that has been stripped of identity first, as described below.
4.1 What we never send
The identity gate removes all of the following before anything leaves us:
- Your name, and the names of family members, employees, tenants, or clients;
- Your email address, username, phone number, and postal address;
- The name of your business, its business number, and anyone's role or title within it;
- Bank account numbers, card numbers and their last digits, and the reference numbers printed on statements;
- Our own internal identifiers for your account and your records;
- The original statement file you uploaded. Statements are read on our own servers. The file itself is never passed to anyone.
4.2 What we do send, once it has been stripped
- A transaction's description with the identifying parts removed, its amount, its date, and the type of account it came from;
- The list of categories you are choosing between;
- For business bookkeeping, the merchant's name — a merchant is another company, not you, and its name is what makes the suggestion possible. For household bookkeeping, merchant names are removed as well;
- For the budgeting assistant, rounded figures describing a household — income, number of people, number of children, housing and vehicle costs — together with a region rather than a city or an address.
An AI provider receiving this cannot tell whose finances it is looking at, because we never tell it, and we never send it anything that would let it work that out.
4.3 Training
We do not permit AI providers to use anything we send them to train their models. Because what we send is stripped of identity in the first place, even a failure on their side could not expose who you are.
4.4 The first exception — reading a receipt photograph
A photograph cannot be stripped of identity the way text can: a receipt image may show a cardholder name or the last digits of a card, and the only way to find out is to read the picture. So we give you the choice, and the choice is yours to make:
- Read it here (the default). The receipt is read on our own servers and the image never leaves SharpPenny. This is slower and less accurate on creased, faded, or poorly lit receipts.
- Send it to Google Cloud Vision. More accurate, and the photograph — whole and unedited — is sent to Google to be read. This happens only if you tick the box that says so. The box is never ticked for you, and you can change your mind at any time in your settings; the change applies to every receipt you upload afterwards.
4.5 The second exception — the business address search box
When you set up a business, the address field offers suggestions as you type. Making a suggestion means asking a mapping service about the words you have typed, so what you type in that one field — which may include your business name and address — is sent to Google Places while you are typing it. There is no way to offer address suggestions without asking somebody about the address.
This happens only in that field, only while you are typing in it, and only because you are using it. Every other part of your business record stays with us. If you would rather nothing about your business reached a mapping service, type the address and ignore the suggestions.
4.6 Asking us to stop
You can decline the AI‑assisted features and continue to use the rest of the Service; categorizing, reporting, budgeting, and tax preparation all work without them.
5. How we share your information
We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it for cross‑context behavioural advertising. We share information only with service providers ("subprocessors") that help us run the Service, under contracts that limit their use of your data. What each one receives is set out here:
- AI providers — Anthropic, Groq, OpenAI, and Google (Gemini). These receive de‑identified data only, as described in Section 4. They are never given your name, your email address, your business name, your account numbers, or your files.
- Google Cloud Vision — receives a receipt photograph only when you have ticked the box asking us to send it (Section 4.4). If you have not, it receives nothing.
- Google Places — receives what you type into the business address search box, while you are typing it (Section 4.5).
- Google (Gmail) — if you connect Gmail to import receipts, we read the messages and attachments you authorize. This is us fetching your mail for you; nothing of yours is sent outward.
- Email delivery (Amazon Simple Email Service) — receives your email address and the message, so that account and service emails can reach you. When a business uses SharpPenny to email you an invoice, or a reminder about one, it receives your email address, the business's name, the invoice number and due date, and a private link to the invoice. It never receives the amounts or the invoice itself; those stay on SharpPenny until you open the link.
- Hosting and infrastructure — stores and serves the application and its data on our behalf.
- Payment processing — Stripe — if and when paid subscriptions are enabled, receives what is needed to take payment and work out sales tax: your card, entered on Stripe's own page, your email address so Stripe can send your receipts, and your billing country and postal code. We do not send Stripe your name or any of our own account numbers. Prices are before tax, and the tax depends on where you are. A payment processor is the only kind of outside service that may receive your postal code; artificial intelligence services never do unless you agree to it when asked. We do not store full card numbers.
We may also disclose information if required by law, to enforce our terms, or in connection with a business transfer, with notice where required.
6. How long we keep your information
We keep your information for as long as your account is active and as needed to provide the Service, then for any period required to meet legal, tax, or accounting obligations. You can ask us to delete your account and associated data as described in Section 8.
7. How we protect your information
We use administrative, technical, and physical safeguards appropriate to the sensitivity of financial information, including encryption in transit, access controls, and hashed passwords. No method of transmission or storage is perfectly secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security.
8. Your privacy rights
8.1 Canada (PIPEDA and provincial laws)
Under Canadian privacy law, you may:
- Access the personal information we hold about you and request a copy;
- Request correction of inaccurate information;
- Withdraw your consent to certain processing (this may limit features);
- Ask questions or make a complaint about our handling of your information.
You may also complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada. If you are in Quebec, additional rights under Law 25 (including de‑indexing and data portability) may apply, and our privacy officer is identified in Section 12.
8.2 United States (California and other states)
Depending on your state of residence (for example, California under the CCPA/CPRA, and Virginia, Colorado, Connecticut, Utah, and other states with comparable laws), you may have the right to:
- Know / access the categories and specific pieces of personal information we have collected about you;
- Delete personal information we have collected;
- Correct inaccurate personal information;
- Opt out of the "sale" or "sharing" of personal information and of targeted advertising — we do none of these, so there is nothing to opt out of;
- Not be discriminated against for exercising your rights.
To exercise any right, contact us as described in Section 12. We will verify your request against your account information, and you may use an authorized agent where the law permits.
9. Children's privacy
SharpPenny is not directed to children for independent sign‑up. The family budgeting feature is intended to be set up and managed by a parent or guardian, who creates and controls any child profile and can review or delete that child's information at any time. Where a child under 13 (United States, under COPPA) or under the applicable age in Canada uses the feature, we rely on the parent or guardian's consent and involvement. If you believe a child's information has been provided without appropriate parental consent, contact us and we will delete it.
10. International data transfers
We and our subprocessors may process your information in Canada, the United States, or other countries. Where information crosses borders, it may be subject to the laws of those countries; we take steps to protect it consistent with this policy.
11. Changes to this policy
We may update this policy from time to time. We will change the "Last updated" date above and, for material changes, provide additional notice where required.
12. Contact us
To exercise your rights or ask about this policy, contact:
[COMPANY LEGAL NAME]
Privacy Officer: [PRIVACY OFFICER NAME]
Email: [CONTACT EMAIL]
Address: [MAILING ADDRESS]