Privacy Policy
A+ Bookkeeping Effective 1 October 2026 · Last updated 1 October 2026
A+ Bookkeeping (“we”, “us”) provides bookkeeping, payroll and compliance services to businesses in Alberta. This policy explains what personal information we collect, why we collect it, where it is kept, who we share it with, and the choices and rights you have.
It covers our website, our online booking and document pages, and the client management system we use to run our practice. It does not cover other organizations’ websites we may link to.
Who is responsible for your information
Our Privacy Officer is Adelaine, the owner of A+ Bookkeeping.
Email: privacy@aplusbooks.ca
You can contact our Privacy Officer with any question about this policy, to ask what we hold about you, or to make a complaint.
What we collect
When you contact us or ask for a quote, whether through our website form, by email, by phone or in person: your name, business name, email address, phone number, preferred way of being contacted, the services you are interested in, and whatever you tell us in your message. If you are referred to us, we record who referred you.
When you become a client, we additionally collect what we need to do the work:
- Business details — legal and operating name, business address, entity type, industry, fiscal year end
- Tax and registration identifiers — Business Number, CRA program accounts, GST registration and filing frequency, WCB-Alberta account number, Alberta corporate registry identifiers
- Financial information relating to your books — revenue range, transaction volumes, the number (not the numbers) of bank and credit card accounts, invoices, payments and time records
- Notes our staff make about your file so we can serve you properly
If we run your payroll, we also handle information about your employees on your behalf — their names, pay rates and TD1 forms. We keep these in your secure document folder and your payroll platform, not in our client management database.
We never collect Social Insurance Numbers in our client management system, in any field, including free-text notes.
Automatically, when you use our website form or a link we send you, our bot-protection service records your IP address and basic browser signals to distinguish real people from automated abuse.
We do not use tracking for advertising, and we do not sell personal information to anyone, ever.
Why we collect it
We collect and use personal information only for these purposes:
- To answer your inquiry and prepare a proposal
- To enter into and perform our engagement with you — bookkeeping, payroll, GST and compliance filings
- To bill you and collect payment
- To meet our own legal and professional obligations, including record-keeping the Canada Revenue Agency expects
- To communicate with you about your file, deadlines and our services
- To protect our systems from fraud and abuse
If we ever want to use your information for a new purpose, we will ask you first.
Where your information is kept
Our client management system, its database and its backups are hosted in Canada — Google Cloud’s Montreal region, with disaster-recovery copies in Toronto.
Two of the services we rely on store information outside Canada, and both are described below.
Information that goes outside Canada
Google Workspace — your documents and our email with you. Your files live in our Google Workspace shared drives, and our correspondence with you lives in Google’s email and calendar services. Google Workspace does not offer Canadian storage on our plan, so we have set our data region to the United States. We chose a named country rather than leaving it unspecified, so that we can tell you plainly where your information is.
QuickBooks Online (Intuit). We use QuickBooks Online for invoicing, payments and accounts receivable. To do that, we send Intuit your business name, billing email, address, GST or business number, invoice detail and payment records. Intuit is expected to process this information in the United States.
We are telling you about both of these because Alberta’s Personal Information Protection Act requires us to. While your information is outside Canada, it may be accessible to foreign courts, law enforcement and government authorities under the laws of that country. Our Privacy Officer can answer questions about how this information is handled and about what these providers owe us.
If you pay an invoice online, your card or bank details are entered directly with Intuit’s payment service. Those details never pass through, and are never stored by, our systems.
Who else we share with
We share personal information only with service providers who help us run the practice, and only for that purpose:
| Who | What they do for us | What they receive |
|---|---|---|
| Google Cloud (Canada) | Hosts our client management system, database and backups | All information in the system, kept in Canada |
| Google Workspace (United States) | Email, calendar, and storage of your documents | Names, email addresses, correspondence, your documents — see the cross-border section above |
| Intuit QuickBooks Online | Invoicing, payments, accounts receivable | See the cross-border section above |
| Google reCAPTCHA | Protects our forms from automated abuse | IP address and browser signals of form submitters |
| Bald Guy Solutions (Canada) | Builds and maintains our client management system on our behalf | Technical access to the system in order to support and maintain it. They do not use your information for their own purposes, and ordinary support does not involve reading client records. |
We also disclose personal information where the law requires it — for example, a court order or a lawful demand from a government authority.
We do not use artificial intelligence or machine-learning services to process your information. No feature of our system sends your information to an AI service, and no automated model scores, drafts, classifies or makes decisions about you. Third-party software we use, such as accounting, payroll or receipt-capture software, may include artificial intelligence or machine-learning features as part of its normal operation.
Automated processing and your right to a human
Our system applies some rules automatically. None of them ends your relationship with us, sets your price, or denies you service without a person deciding:
- Overdue accounts. Our system flags an account when an invoice is more than 30 days outstanding and prepares a notice. The owner reviews and approves every suspension before it takes effect, and work falling inside a statutory filing deadline is never suspended. Any notice tells you the specific invoice, the amount, its age, and exactly what to do to resolve it.
- An internal client health indicator, assembled from things like overdue invoices and outstanding documents. It is advisory, it is never shown to you, and it triggers nothing on its own.
- Lead prioritisation, which affects how quickly we follow up. It never rejects or prices an inquiry.
You can ask us to explain any of these, and you can ask a person to review any decision that affects you.
How long we keep it
| Information | How long |
|---|---|
| Website inquiries that never become a client relationship | 30 days |
| Leads, contacts and their history | At least 24 months, then reviewed by the owner |
| Client records, fiscal profiles, filings and deadlines | Life of the engagement plus at least 24 months, then reviewed |
| Invoices, payments and time records | At least 24 months with us; 6 years in QuickBooks, reflecting CRA record-keeping expectations |
| Signed engagement letters and the evidence that proves them | 10 years, because that evidence is what makes the agreement enforceable under Alberta law |
| Records of who did what in the system | Kept for accountability |
| Your documents | For the life of the engagement, then archived |
Nothing is deleted automatically from your client records — deletions past these minimums are reviewed by the owner.
Your rights
You can ask us to:
- Tell you what we hold about you and how we have used and disclosed it
- Correct anything inaccurate
- Give you a copy in a portable format
- Delete information we no longer need
We respond within 10 business days.
Some information we cannot delete on request — signed engagement evidence, our accountability records, and records the CRA expects us to keep. If that applies to your request, we will tell you in writing exactly what we are keeping and why, and delete the rest.
A complete deletion may also involve QuickBooks and our document storage. We will handle those and confirm when it is done.
Keeping it safe
Access is limited to authorized individuals who need it and is protected using secure account authentication and two-step verification. Information is encrypted in transit and at rest. Our system records who accessed and changed what. Sensitive details are kept out of our technical logs by design.
If a breach creates a real risk of significant harm to you, we will notify you and the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Alberta, as the law requires.
Complaints
Please raise concerns with our Privacy Officer first — we would rather fix it directly. If you are not satisfied, you may complain to:
Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Alberta oipc.ab.ca · 1-888-878-4044
Which laws apply
Alberta’s Personal Information Protection Act governs this policy. Canada’s Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act also applies to information that crosses provincial or national borders, including the transfer to Intuit described above.
Our clients and their contacts are in Alberta.
Changes
If we change this policy we will update the date at the top. Where a change materially affects how we handle information we already hold, we will tell affected clients directly.