Privacy policy.

Practice Control is practice-management software for UK accountancy firms, provided by Ai Efficacy Ltd ("Practice Control", "we", "us"), company number 17126148, registered at 71-75 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London, WC2H 9JQ. ICO registration: ZC191099.

Contact for anything in this policy: practicecontrol@practicecontrol.app.

• Accounting firms (our customers) decide what client information goes into Practice Control and why. For that information the firm is the controller and we are its processor: we handle it only to provide the service and on the firm's instructions. If you are a firm's client and have a question about your data, please contact your accountant first.
• For our own account, billing, security and usage data (below) we are the controller.

• Account data (about the firm's staff): name, work email, role, a hashed password, and an encrypted two-factor authentication secret.
• Firm and client data (entered by the firm): client names and references, contact details, company and VAT numbers, year ends, services and agreed fees, notes, jobs, deadlines, review items and uploaded documents. A client's UTR is stored encrypted.
• Activity records: an append-only audit log of actions taken in the system (who, what, when). It cannot be edited or deleted after the fact.
• Connected accounts: if a user connects an account, we store the access and refresh tokens needed to use it, encrypted. See sections 5 and 6.
• Technical data: sign-in and security events, IP address and browser details in server logs, and the cookies described in section 10.

We do not sell personal data, and we do not use it for advertising.

Staff can optionally connect their own Gmail so reminders and chasers send from their own address. If you connect Gmail:

• We request one permission: gmail.send, which lets Practice Control send email on your behalf. We also request basic sign-in information (your email address and name) so we can show which mailbox is connected.
• We do not read your inbox. Practice Control cannot read, list, search or delete your email with the permission we request.
• What we store: your Gmail address and the encrypted tokens needed to send. We store the messages the firm chooses to send through the system, as part of the firm's own records.
• How we use it: only to send the messages you or your firm instruct, and to show the connection status. We do not use Google user data for advertising, we do not sell it, and no human reads it except where you ask us for support, we need to investigate abuse, or the law requires it.
• Sharing: we do not transfer Google user data to third parties except our sub-processors (section 8) as needed to provide the service, or where the law requires.
• Disconnecting: you can disconnect Gmail at any time in Practice Control (Settings, My Account), or revoke access at https://myaccount.google.com/permissions. On disconnect we stop using the stored tokens.

Practice Control's use and transfer to any other app of information received from Google APIs will adhere to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.

• Microsoft 365 / Outlook: if connected, we request permission to send mail as you and to read your mailbox. We read it only when a person opens a client's Comms tab or the Communications Centre, to show their own conversations with clients. We show only emails to or from our clients' recorded addresses or the business domain only that client uses (never a free mail provider such as gmail.com), and we do not store the contents of the emails we read. Gmail is send-only.
• Xero and Sage: if a firm connects them, we read contacts and invoice information to create and update the firm's own client records. Read-only.
• IRIS: files the firm uploads are imported into its client records.

A firm can disconnect any of these at any time in Settings, Integrations.

Our production systems are hosted by Railway in the United States. Transfers of personal data from the UK to our providers are covered by the transfer mechanism in each provider's data processing agreement (for example the UK Addendum to the EU Standard Contractual Clauses, or the ICO's International Data Transfer Agreement).

We use these providers to run the service, each under a contract that requires them to protect the data:

Optional AI features. AI drafting, document extraction and the chat assistant are off by default and switched on by a firm's Admin. When on, they use the firm's own Anthropic or OpenAI account and key, so data goes from Practice Control straight to that provider under the firm's own agreement. What is sent depends on the feature, and the chat assistant's lookups are limited to summary information; UTRs, contact details, company and VAT numbers, fees, notes, email contents and documents are never sent to it. Practice Control does not store chat conversations.

We may also disclose data where the law requires it.

• Firm and client data: for as long as the firm is a customer, then as the firm instructs. Accountancy records often have to be kept for years under anti-money-laundering rules, so erasure of a client is done by anonymisation: identifying fields are permanently removed and documents deleted, while job and deadline records stay. The system flags archived clients for review after a firm-configurable number of years (6 by default).
• Audit log: kept, unaltered, for the life of the account. Entries written before an erasure keep the information as originally recorded.
• Account data: while the account is active. Users are deactivated, not deleted, once they have an audit history.
• Connected-account tokens: until you disconnect, or the connection expires.

We use only cookies needed for the service to work: a session cookie that keeps you signed in, and preference cookies for layout and light/dark mode. We do not use advertising or cross-site tracking cookies.

Passwords are hashed. Two-factor authentication is mandatory. Two-factor secrets, client UTRs, stored AI keys and connected-account tokens are encrypted at rest (AES-256-GCM). Access is limited by role, and Staff see only their own clients. Every action that touches client data is recorded in an audit log that cannot be edited. No system is perfectly secure; if a breach affects personal data we will notify the affected firms and, where required, the ICO without undue delay.

Under UK GDPR you can ask to access your data, correct it, erase it (subject to legal retention duties), restrict or object to its use, and move it. A firm can export all data held on one of its clients in a single download. To use a right, contact the firm that holds your data, or us at practicecontrol@practicecontrol.app and we will route it.

You can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office: https://ico.org.uk, 0303 123 1113.

The service is for professional use by accountancy firms and is not directed at children.

We will post updates here and change the "Last updated" date. For material changes we will tell firms in advance.

Ai Efficacy Ltd, 71-75 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London, WC2H 9JQ. practicecontrol@practicecontrol.app