Privacy Notice

Accounting Advisor is an accounting and advisory practice at 2828 N Central Ave, Suite 1000, Phoenix, AZ 85004. This notice covers information the firm collects through this website and in the course of an engagement.

It does not cover Automate Accounting, which is a separate company with its own privacy policy governing the software and the data you keep in it. If you license that software, that agreement is between you and them — their privacy policy is the document that applies to it.

This site has no login and sets no cookies. Our hosting provider keeps ordinary server logs, which include IP addresses, for operational and security purposes.

We measure how the site is used with Plausible Analytics, which we chose because it does this without cookies and without collecting anything that identifies you. It records the page address, the site you arrived from, and your browser, operating system and device type; it derives an approximate location from your IP address and then discards the address rather than storing it. It also records how far down each page you scroll and how long you spend on it, not counting time the page sits in a tab you are not looking at. Everything it reports to us is aggregated, and none of it can be traced back to a person or followed across other websites. Plausible processes and stores that data in the European Union.

We also record four events, each of which is a click on a way of contacting us: the email address, the phone number, the enquiry form and the estimator’s send button. We count them; we do not know who clicked. They exist because every one of those actions opens your own mail or phone app rather than loading a page, so without them we could not tell whether anybody who wanted to reach us managed to.

We do not use analytics to build a profile of you, and there is no session recording or heat mapping on this site, and the only chat on it is our own assistant, described below. If you would rather not be counted at all, any content blocker that stops the script will do it, and nothing on the site behaves differently.

The contact form composes an email in your own mail client rather than sending anything to a server we run. Nothing you type into it reaches us unless you send that email.

The assistant on our ask page answers accounting questions with a language model run by Anthropic. When you use it, the text you type — your question and the earlier turns of the same conversation — is sent to Anthropic to generate the answer. Their terms for traffic sent through their programming interface govern what they keep and for how long; their statement of it is here.

We keep every question asked of the assistant and every answer it gives. With each question we keep the answer’s reference number, when the question was asked, the provider and the model that answered, the reference notes the assistant was given and how closely they matched the question, the checks we run on each answer, how the answer ended, how long it took, its length in tokens and our estimate of what it cost, which version of the assistant’s instructions answered it, a random identifier for the conversation, the role you picked if you picked one, and any rating or comment you leave. Before anything is kept we remove what looks like a card, bank account, routing or tax identification number, a password or a key, and note how many we removed; that is a pattern match and cannot catch every format. We keep these records until we delete them, and we read and analyse them to find what the assistant answers badly, which reference notes to write next and what the people who use it ask about. They are not linked to your name or your address. The identifier for a conversation is made up by your browser and kept there, so the questions of a conversation you come back to share it; an answer’s reference number is shown with an answer that does not finish and included in the email when you use Ask a Person. If you send us a reference number, we can find that conversation. The records are held by Neon, the database provider this site uses.

Our server logs record, for each question, the answer’s reference number, when it was asked, how long the answer took and how it ended, roughly how long the question, the conversation before it and the answer were, how many of our reference notes matched it and how closely, which of the assistant’s tools the answer used — for example, that it prepared an estimate or offered you choices — and which of the checks we run on each answer it did not pass, if any. They do not record the words of your question or of the answer, or the details you give for an estimate. Our hosting provider keeps those logs for as long as its plan does. Requests are limited by the address they come from, which means your IP address is used, briefly, to count them.

Please do not put account numbers, tax identification numbers, passwords or anything confidential into a question. Nothing on this site can take it back from the provider once it has been sent.

Whatever you put in your message: your name, your company, your contact details, and whatever you tell us about your situation. We use it to reply and to work out whether we can help. We do not sell it, and we do not add you to a marketing list you did not ask to join.

Once you engage us we handle your financial records, and that is governed by the engagement letter rather than by this page. In general terms: we treat client information as confidential, we access only what the work requires, and we use subprocessors — for example the software platform where your books are kept, and ordinary business tools for mail and file storage.

A current list of those tools is available on request: email us at the address at the end of this notice and we will send the list as it stands that day. Four of them serve this site itself: our hosting provider, Plausible Analytics where this deployment is measured, Anthropic for the assistant described above, and Neon, the database provider that holds the assistant's records described above.

We keep engagement records for as long as the professional and legal obligations that apply to accounting records require, and enquiry correspondence for as long as it is useful. You can ask what we hold about you, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete what we are not required to keep. Email the address at the end of this notice.

The firm operates from the State of Arizona. Questions about this notice go to contact@accounting-advisor.com, or by post to 2828 N Central Ave, Suite 1000, Phoenix, AZ 85004.