Privacy policy
Last updated September 25, 2026
ACDO is accounting software that runs on your computer. Your books never reach us. This policy explains the narrow set of information that does.
1. The short version
- Your company files, accounts, transactions and every figure in your books stay on your computer. We do not receive them, store them, or have any means of reading them.
- We hold your email address, your licence key, and a record of the devices that activated it.
- We do not sell personal information, and we do not use it for advertising.
- You can ask us what we hold about you, correct it, or have it deleted, at privacy@acdo.app.
2. Who is responsible
ACDO is responsible for the personal information described here. Privacy questions and requests go to privacy@acdo.app.
3. Information that stays on your computer
ACDO stores each company’s books in a database file in your own user profile. That includes your chart of accounts, journal entries, balances, customer and vendor records, and any other bookkeeping data you enter. This information is never transmitted to us and is not backed up by us.
Your company file is not encrypted at rest. Anyone with access to your Windows account — or to an unencrypted copy of your disk — can open it. We state this plainly rather than leaving you to discover it. Turn on BitLocker or equivalent disk encryption, use a password on your Windows account, and keep backups somewhere you control.
4. Information we do collect
| What | Why |
|---|---|
| Email address | To issue your licence, send you the key, reply to support, and notify you about your subscription |
| Name and billing country | Provided at checkout; used for your receipt and to apply the correct sales tax |
| Licence key and plan | To let ACDO confirm your subscription is active |
| Device identifier | A value derived from your computer’s hardware, used to count how many machines a licence is active on |
| Activation records | When a licence was activated, deactivated or reset, the application version, and a shortened IP address — for detecting licence sharing and abuse |
| Support correspondence | Whatever you choose to send us when you ask for help |
IP addresses are shortened before they are stored: the last part of an IPv4 address, and the last portion of an IPv6 address, are set to zero. We keep enough to see patterns of abuse and not enough to identify a household.
What we never collect
- The contents of your books, in any form
- Your payment card number — see section 6
- Files, folders or documents from your computer
- Analytics or behavioural tracking inside the application
5. How your information is used
We use the information in section 4 only to:
- Deliver and validate your licence
- Enforce the limit on how many computers a licence runs on
- Detect and prevent licence abuse
- Answer your support requests
- Send you messages about your own subscription — renewals, failed payments, expiry
- Keep the tax and accounting records Canadian law requires us to keep
We do not send marketing email unless you ask us to. If you ever opt in, every message will identify us and carry a working unsubscribe link, as Canada’s anti-spam legislation requires.
6. Payments
Subscriptions are sold through Lemon Squeezy, which acts as the merchant of record. They collect and process your payment details under their own privacy policy; we never receive or store your card number. From them we receive your email address, your order and subscription identifiers, your plan, and your billing country.
7. Where your information is stored
Licence information is held on a server operated by us in REPLACE-SERVER-COUNTRY, and reaches it through Cloudflare, which routes and protects the connection. Lemon Squeezy processes payment information on its own infrastructure.
Information stored or processed outside Canada is subject to the laws of the country it is in, and may in principle be accessible to that country’s authorities under their own legal processes. We are telling you this because Canadian privacy law expects us to, and because you should know it before you hand over an email address.
8. How long we keep it
| Record | Kept for |
|---|---|
| Account and licence records | While your subscription is active, and afterwards only as long as needed for the purposes below |
| Activation and abuse records | 365 days, then deleted automatically |
| Billing and tax records | 6 years, as required by Canadian tax law |
| Support email | Up to two years, then deleted |
9. Who else sees it
We do not sell personal information and we do not share it for anyone else’s marketing. It is disclosed only to:
- Lemon Squeezy — to take payment and issue receipts
- Cloudflare — to route and protect traffic to our licence server
- Our email provider — to deliver licence keys and replies
- Authorities — only where a valid legal requirement obliges us, and only to the extent it obliges us
10. How it is protected
- All communication between ACDO and our licence server is encrypted in transit
- Licences are cryptographically signed; the signing key is held only on the licence server
- Your licence key is stored on your computer using Windows’ own protected storage
- IP addresses are shortened before storage, as described in section 4
- The administrative interface to the licence server is not reachable from the internet at all
- Backups of licence data are taken regularly and restore-tested
No system is perfect. If a breach ever creates a real risk of significant harm to you, we will notify you and the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, as the law requires.
11. Your rights
You can ask us to:
- Tell you what personal information we hold about you and how it has been used
- Correct anything that is wrong
- Delete your information, subject to records we are legally required to keep
- Withdraw your consent — though this ends your ability to use ACDO, since we cannot validate a licence without it
Write to privacy@acdo.app. We will respond within 30 days. If you are not satisfied with our answer, you can complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada at https://www.priv.gc.ca.
Note that deleting your account does not delete your books — those are on your computer, and only you can remove them.
12. This website
acdo.app does not set advertising or analytics cookies and does not track you across sites. Our hosting provider and Cloudflare keep standard server logs, including IP addresses, for security and reliability.
13. Children
ACDO is business software and is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 18.
14. Changes
If we change this policy in a way that materially affects you, we will email the address on your account before the change takes effect. The date at the top always reflects the current version.