Privacy Policy

Last updated 2 October 2026

This explains what BZ Bookkeeping LLC does with information. It covers two separate things, and they stay separate the whole way down: Part one is what this website collects from anyone who visits it, and Part two is what we handle as bookkeepers once someone becomes a client. If you are just reading the site, only Part one applies to you.

The standalone AI bookkeeper described on this site is in development. An enquiry about it uses the same contact form and email process described here. This website does not connect your inbox, receive receipts for processing, run payroll or provide access to that product. Product-specific data handling will be explained before those features launch.

Who we are

BZ Bookkeeping LLC — trading as BZBookkeeping — is a bookkeeping firm registered in New Jersey, United States. Two people run it and both of them are named on this site. We are responsible for the information described below.

For anything about this policy, or to ask us to delete something we hold, email ray@bzbookkeeping.com. A person reads it.

Part one — this website

The short version

This site sets no cookies, runs no advertising trackers, has no login, and has no database. There is nothing here that follows you to another website. The only information you can hand us is what you choose to type into the contact form. That is also why there is no cookie banner — not because we suppressed one, but because there is nothing to consent to.

The contact form

If you fill in the form, we receive what you typed: your name and email address, and — where you chose to answer them — your phone number, your business name, which BZBookkeeping option interests you, what kind of business it is, what bookkeeping tool you use now, how far behind your books are, and whatever you wrote in the message box. Every field except name and email is optional and the form works without them.

That submission is turned into a plain-text email and delivered to our own mailbox by Resend, our email provider. It is sent as plain text specifically so that nothing typed into the form is ever interpreted as code or markup by an email client. The reply address on it is set to the address you gave, so that replying to you works.

We use it to reply to you. That is the entire purpose. It is not added to a mailing list, not loaded into a CRM, not enriched against any third-party data source, not used to advertise to you anywhere, and never sold or rented to anybody.

Two mechanical details worth stating plainly, because they involve information you did not knowingly provide:

The form contains one hidden field that a person never sees and never fills in. Automated spam tools fill it in, and when it arrives filled the submission is discarded. Nothing is stored either way. This is also why there is no CAPTCHA on the form.
Your IP address is used to limit the form to five submissions per hour from the same address. It is held in the memory of the server process for at most that hour, is never written to a database or a file, is never attached to your message, and disappears entirely whenever the server restarts.

Analytics

We use Vercel Web Analytics to count visits. It sets no cookies and creates no persistent identifier for you: according to Vercel’s own documentation it identifies a session using a hash derived from the incoming request, and that hash is discarded automatically after 24 hours. It is not tied to your name, your email or your IP address, and it cannot follow you to any other website.

What it records for each visit:

Where the visit went: The page URL and path, the referring site if you arrived from a link, and the timestamp.
Roughly where you are: Country, region and city — derived from the network request, not from your device’s location services. We never see a street address or coordinates.
What you are reading it on: Device type, operating system and version, browser and version.

We also record three counts of our own: that the contact form was scrolled into view, that a submission succeeded, and that a submission failed along with a technical reason code such as http_500. The third one exists so that a contact form which has quietly broken does not look like a slow week. Nothing you type is ever attached to any of these — the only value we send is a short code chosen from a fixed list in our own source code.

The practical summary: analytics tells us that somebody in a given city read this page on a phone and came from a search engine. It does not tell us who they were, and there is no way for us to connect it to a contact form submission or to a client.

Cookies and browser storage

This site stores nothing on your device. No cookies, no local storage, no session storage — checked on the live site, both on page load and after submitting the form. No third party is permitted to set anything either: the site sends a permissions policy that switches off the browser’s own advertising-topics interface along with camera, microphone, geolocation and payment access.

Hosting logs

The site is hosted by Vercel, which keeps ordinary server request logs for its own operational and security purposes, in the same way every web host does. Those logs are Vercel’s and are handled under their privacy policy. We do not build anything on top of them and do not export them.

Part two — bookkeeping clients

What we handle

Doing your books means handling your financial records. In practice that is bank and credit card transaction history, statements, receipts and invoices, your chart of accounts, payroll summaries produced by whichever payroll provider you already use, and the names and contact details of your customers and vendors as they appear in your own records.

What we do not want

We do not ask for and do not want your online banking username and password, your card numbers, or Social Security numbers. If you send any of those to us we will tell you, ask you to change the credential where relevant, and delete our copy. Please do not put any of it in the contact form on this website.

Where your books actually live

In your own QuickBooks Online account, in your name, on a subscription billed by Intuit directly to you. We work inside it as users you invite. This is deliberate and it is the single most important fact in this document: if we ever stop working together, you remove our access and you still have every ledger, every reconciliation and every report, because the file was never ours to hold hostage.

Bank connections

Transactions reach the books one of two ways. If your bank is supported by QuickBooks’ own bank feeds, we use those. If it is not, we use Plaid, which is the connection service most US accounting and finance apps rely on. In both cases you authenticate directly with your bank or with Plaid — your banking credentials go to them, never to us, and we never see or store them.

These connections exist to read transaction history into your books. We do not have, and will not ask for, the ability to move money, initiate payments or transfer funds from any account of yours.

Who else sees it

We do not sell client information, we do not share it for advertising, and we do not give it to anyone for their own purposes. It reaches other companies only where one of them is the tool doing the work:

Intuit — QuickBooks Online: The accounting system your books live in, on your own subscription in your own name.
Plaid: Bank connections, only where QuickBooks’ own feeds do not cover your bank, and only with your authorisation.
Google Workspace: Our email and file storage. Correspondence with you, and documents you email us, are stored there.
Vercel: Hosting for this website, and the analytics described in Part one. No client financial information ever touches this website or its servers — there is no client portal here and no database behind it.
Resend: Delivery of contact form submissions from this website to our mailbox. Nothing else passes through it.

The one other case is legal compulsion — a court order, subpoena or equivalent legal obligation. If that ever happens and we are permitted to tell you, we will.

How long we keep things

We keep client records for twelve months after an engagement ends, and then delete our copies. Enquiries that never become engagements are deleted within twelve months as well. You can ask us to delete sooner and we will, unless we are legally required to keep something.

Deleting our copies does not delete your books, and that is the point: the QuickBooks Online file is on your subscription, so it stays with you indefinitely regardless of what we do.

Confidentiality

We do not discuss clients, name clients as references, publish case studies, or use anyone’s business as an example without written permission first. There is no testimonial on this website, and there will not be one that we did not ask for and receive permission to use.

Your choices

Whether or not a particular privacy law applies to a firm our size, you can ask us to do all of the following and we will:

Tell you what information we hold about you.
Give you a copy of it.
Correct anything that is wrong.
Delete it, subject to any records we are legally required to retain.
Stop emailing you. We do not run a marketing list, so in practice this means we stop replying to a thread you no longer want.

Email ray@bzbookkeeping.com and we will confirm within five business days. We do not charge for any of this and we will not ask you why.

Security

This website is served only over HTTPS, sends a strict set of security headers, and has no login, no user accounts and no database — there is no store of personal information on it to breach. Access to client records is limited to the two owners of the firm.

No system is perfectly secure and we are not going to claim otherwise. If information we hold is ever exposed, we will tell the people affected directly and promptly rather than waiting to be asked.

Children

This is a business-to-business service. It is not directed at children, and we do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 18.

Changes to this policy

If this changes, the date at the top changes with it. If a change materially affects how we handle client information, we will email clients rather than relying on you to re-read the page.