Privacy Policy
Effective
This explains what Dear CFO collects, why, who else sees it, and what you can ask us to do about it. It is written to be read: where something is a genuine limitation rather than a reassurance, it says so.
1.Who we are, and what this covers
Dear CFO is a financial reporting and planning platform built by Phoenix Strategy Group. This policy covers our marketing site at dearcfo.com and the application at app.dearcfo.com.
It does not cover the systems you connect to Dear CFO, such as your accounting software, your payment processor or your CRM. Those remain governed by their own policies and by your agreements with them.
2.Two different kinds of data, handled differently
This distinction runs through everything below, so it is worth stating first.
Data about you, as a customer of ours
Your name, your work email address, your sign-in details, how you use the product. We decide how this is used, and this policy tells you how.
Data you connect, about your business
Your ledger, your invoices, your customers, your employees. We hold and process this on your instructions, to provide the service to you. You decide what to connect and what to disconnect; you remain responsible for it, including for having the right to share it with us. We do not use it to build products for anyone else, and we do not sell it.
If you are an individual whose information reached us because a business connected their systems (as their customer, vendor or employee), then that business is who you should contact. We will help them respond.
3.What we collect
Account and identity
Your email address, and a password or a Google sign-in, handled through Firebase Authentication. Your display name within a company. We do not store your password.
Data from the systems you connect
Listed in full in the next section. This is the bulk of what we hold.
Usage and technical data
We keep our own records of how the application is used: pages visited, the page you arrived from, browser and device details, time zone, and your IP address. We also record client-side errors so we can fix them. This is first-party: the application runs no third-party analytics and no advertising trackers. This site, dearcfo.com, is different: it uses Hotjar, HubSpot, RB2B and Google Tag Manager to see how visitors use it, who they are, where they came from and how our advertising performs, described under Cookies. These records are deleted after 30 days.
What you send us
Files you upload, questions you ask the AI analyst, tasks and comments you write, and anything you include in a support or bug report. Bug reports may include a screenshot of your screen at the time, which will show whatever was on it.
4.The systems you can connect, and what each one brings
You choose which of these to connect and can disconnect any of them at any time. 18 of the 22 carry information about identifiable people, typically your own customers, vendors or employees, so they are worth reading rather than skimming.
- QuickBooks Online
- accounts, invoices, bills, payments, journal entries and the general ledger, including the names, email addresses and phone numbers of your customers, vendors and employees.
- Xero
- accounts, invoices, payments, bank transactions and reports, including contact names, email addresses and phone numbers.
- HubSpot
- contacts, companies, deals, line items and owners. Contacts include names, email addresses, phone numbers, job titles and locations, and we copy every custom property your portal stores on a contact, so the exact fields depend on how you have configured HubSpot.
- Shopify
- orders, products, inventory, discounts, refunds and customers, including customer names, email addresses, phone numbers and marketing-consent status.
- Square
- payments, payouts, orders, items, inventory, invoices and disputes, plus customer names and email addresses and your team members.
- Stripe
- charges, balances, payouts, invoices, subscriptions, products and disputes, including customer names, email addresses and the last four digits of payment cards.
- Facebook Ads
- ad accounts, campaigns, ad sets, ads, creatives and daily performance metrics.
- Google Ads
- accounts, campaigns, ad groups, ads and daily performance metrics.
- Google Business Profile
- locations, performance metrics and reviews, including reviewer names and the text of their reviews.
- Google Sheets
- the contents of the specific spreadsheets you choose. We request only access to files you pick, not to your whole Drive, so what this includes is entirely up to you.
- Birdeye
- business listings and reviews, including reviewer names and review text.
- Tekmetric
- shops, repair orders, jobs, appointments, vehicles, employees and customers, including customer names, email addresses, phone numbers and addresses.
- ServiceTitan
- jobs, projects, estimates, invoices and their line items, payments, leads, business units, employees and technicians, and customers, including customer names, addresses, email addresses and phone numbers.
- Jobber
- requests, quotes, jobs, invoices, payment records and payouts, including client names, company names, contact names, email addresses, phone numbers and property addresses.
- Salesforce
- accounts, contacts, leads, opportunities and their line items and history, campaigns, tasks, events, products, price books and users, plus any custom objects you choose. Contacts, leads and users include names, email addresses, phone numbers, job titles and locations, and we copy every field the connected Salesforce user can read, custom fields included, so the exact fields depend on how you have configured Salesforce.
- Gusto
- your company profile and locations, employees and contractors (names, work and personal email addresses, phone numbers, job titles, departments, managers, hire and termination dates and pay rates), departments, pay schedules, payrolls and their totals, each employee's pay on each payroll (gross and net pay, hours, taxes, benefits and deductions) and contractor payments. We do not collect social security numbers, dates of birth or home addresses.
- Keap
- contacts (names, email addresses, phone numbers, postal addresses, company and custom fields) and the tags applied to them, companies, orders with their line items, invoices and payments, subscriptions, products, sales opportunities, notes, tasks, Keap users, affiliates and commission programs, merchant accounts, and - only if you turn it on - the emails sent to your contacts (sender, recipients, subject, headers and when each was sent, opened and clicked, but not the message body).
- Amazon Seller Central
- your marketplaces, orders and order lines (products, quantities, prices, taxes, promotions and the ship-to city, state and country - never buyer names, emails, phone numbers, street addresses or postal codes), settlements and every settlement line, financial events (charges, fees, refunds, adjustments and reimbursements), FBA inventory, listings, FBA and seller-fulfilled returns, and - only if you turn it on - the Sales & Traffic business report.
- Amazon Ads
- your advertiser profiles (marketplace, currency, time zone, account name), Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Display campaigns, ad groups, keywords and advertised products with their budgets, bids and states, and daily advertising performance (impressions, clicks, spend, attributed orders, sales and units, and the shopper search terms that triggered your ads).
- Slack
- the questions you send the Dear CFO app in Slack, and the Slack user ID and email address of the person asking, which we use to match them to their Dear CFO login. The app also receives messages in channels it has been added to, only to find follow-up questions addressed to it; every other message is discarded without being stored.
- Your own BigQuery
- the results of the queries you save. Your project stays yours; we copy the rows those queries return into your warehouse, so the contents are entirely up to you.
- Zoom
- meetings, participants, recordings and transcripts of calls held on our Zoom account, including participant names and email addresses and the full text of what was said.
Two of these deserve singling out. Google Sheets and your own BigQuery copy whatever you point them at, so their contents are determined entirely by you. Zoom covers meetings held on our own Zoom account. If we meet with you and the call is recorded, the recording, the participant list and the full transcript are stored and may be summarised by the AI features described below.
5.Google user data
Where you connect Google Ads, Google Business Profile or Google Sheets, we receive data through Google APIs, and additional terms apply.
Dear CFO'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. You can read that policy at developers.google.com/terms/api-services-user-data-policy.
In practice: we request the narrowest scope that will do the job. For Google Sheets we ask only for access to the specific files you select, not for your Drive. We use Google data to provide the features you connected it for, we do not use it for advertising, we do not sell it, and we do not use it to train generalised models. You can revoke our access at any time in your Google account.
6.How the AI features use your data
Dear CFO includes an AI analyst and several generated-text features: summaries, commentary, quality-of-earnings drafts and meeting notes. These are powered by Anthropic's Claude models, and using them means your data is sent to Anthropic to be processed.
What gets sent:
- The results of the query being answered: typically up to a hundred rows of real data from your warehouse, which can include customer and vendor names and contact details.
- The names and structure of your accounts and tables, so the model can write queries.
- Files you attach to a conversation.
- Meeting transcripts, where a meeting is being summarised or scored.
Some AI features can run code in a sandbox that Anthropic hosts, or search the web to answer a question. Where a web search happens, the text of the search query leaves Anthropic to reach a search provider.
We do not use your data to train our own models. Anthropic processes it under their commercial terms as our service provider. If the specific retention and training terms matter to your organisation (and for a finance system they reasonably might), ask us at support@dearcfo.com and we will tell you exactly what our agreement with them provides.
8.Where your data is held
Dear CFO runs on Google Cloud Platform. The application, its database and its background workers run in Google's us-central1 region. The data warehouse is BigQuery in the US multi-region. Files and backups are in Google Cloud Storage, and financial model workbooks are held in a Google Workspace Drive we control.
If you connect your own BigQuery project, that project stays yours and stays wherever you put it, including outside the United States. We read the results of the queries you save and copy those rows into your warehouse in the US.
9.How long we keep it, and what deletion actually does
We keep the data you connect for as long as your account is active and the integration is connected. Disconnect an integration and we stop syncing it.
Usage and error records are deleted after 30 days. Everything else we keep until you ask us to delete it, or until your agreement with us ends.
Backups
We take backups so that we can recover from a failure, and deleting data from the live system does not immediately remove it from those. Being precise, because vague answers here are usually hiding something:
- Database point-in-time recovery logs: 7 days.
- Daily database and warehouse exports: 35 days.
- Monthly database and warehouse exports: 400 days.
So data you delete can persist in a monthly backup for up to 400 days before it ages out. We do not restore backups in order to retrieve deleted data, and a restore for any other reason re-applies outstanding deletion requests.
Deleting your account
You can delete your own user account from the application's settings. To be clear about what that does and does not do: it removes your user record and your membership of any company, and it removes your sign-in credentials. It does not by itself delete the company's connected data, its warehouse, its files or its conversation history. That data belongs to the company, not to you individually, and other people may still be using it.
To delete a company's data entirely, email support@dearcfo.com. We will action it within 30 days and confirm when it is done, subject to the backup timelines above.
10.Security
Data is encrypted in transit and encrypted at rest using Google Cloud's default encryption. Access to the production environment is limited to the people who need it. Each company's warehouse is a separate dataset, and access within the application is controlled per company and per page.
Two things we would rather say than have you discover. Our staff can access your data to support you, to diagnose a problem, and to do the CFO work you have engaged us for. We limit who can and log it, but it is not a system we are locked out of.
And no system is perfectly secure. We cannot promise a breach will never happen; we can promise to tell you promptly if one does.
11.If you live in California
The California Consumer Privacy Act gives California residents specific rights. In the last twelve months we have collected the categories described above: identifiers such as name and email, commercial information, internet activity such as IP address and usage, and, through the systems our customers connect, identifiers and commercial information about their customers, vendors and employees.
We do not sell personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising. We never have.
You have the right to:
- Know what personal information we hold about you and where it came from.
- Request a copy of it.
- Ask us to correct it if it is wrong.
- Ask us to delete it, subject to the backup timelines above.
- Not be treated differently for exercising any of these.
Email support@dearcfo.com. We will verify who you are before we act, usually by replying to the address we already have on file, and respond within 45 days. You may use an authorised agent.
13.Children
Dear CFO is a business tool and is not directed at anyone under 18. We do not knowingly collect information from children. If you believe a child has provided us information, tell us and we will delete it.
14.Changes, and how to reach us
If we change this policy in a way that matters, we will update the effective date at the top and tell account holders by email before it takes effect. Minor corrections we will just make.
Questions, requests, or anything about this policy: support@dearcfo.com, or write to Phoenix Strategy Group, attention Privacy.