Privacy Policy

1. Who we are

The Link is a practice management platform operated by Victoriam Sales Limited (company number 13606514), a company registered in England and Wales. Our registered office is at Merlin House, Brunel Road, Theale, England, RG7 4AB.

Who is responsible for your information. If you use The Link as a client of an accountancy firm, that firm decides what information it asks you for and why. It is the controller of your records, and Victoriam Sales Limited processes them on the firm's behalf and on its instructions. Victoriam Sales Limited is the controller only for what is needed to run the app itself: your sign-in, security records and crash reports. For questions about your records, contact your firm. For questions about the app, contact us.

For privacy enquiries, contact us at enquiries@usethelink.com.

2. What data we collect

We collect and process the following categories of personal data:

• Account information — name, email address, job title, and company name when you or your firm create an account.
• Contact details — phone numbers and postal addresses stored as part of client records managed by your firm.
• Communications — messages, emails, and notes sent or received through the platform.
• Documents and files — files uploaded to or generated within the platform, including signed documents.
• Photographs of documents — images of receipts, invoices, bank statements and similar paperwork, captured with your device camera or uploaded from your device. These images are sent to automated extraction services that read the information off them — see section 4. From a receipt we read the type of document, the supplier and the supplier's VAT number, the date, the receipt or invoice number, the amounts, VAT and currency, the items bought, and how it was paid (for example “Visa” or “Cash”).
• Identity documents — where your firm asks for them, for example during onboarding, photographs of a passport or driving licence. An automated service reads from the image the document's type, number and expiry date, your name and date of birth, and the machine-readable lines printed on it (which on a passport also carry your nationality and sex); a person at your firm checks the result before anything read from it is added to your details.
• Tax and government identifiers — your National Insurance number, Unique Taxpayer Reference, Companies House personal code and similar references, when you or your firm enter them, for example in an onboarding questionnaire.
• Meetings — when you book a meeting with your firm: its time and type, the phone number you give for a phone call, and any note you add about what you want to discuss.
• Audio recordings — voice notes recorded in messages, dictated text, and, where your firm has enabled call recording, recordings of telephone calls. Recordings are transcribed automatically — see section 4.
• Diagnostics and crash reports — when the app encounters an error we collect the technical detail of the failure, including a stack trace, device model, operating system version and app version. Each report carries a hashed user identifier so we can tell whether one person hit the same fault repeatedly. The hash is not reversible into your name or email address by the diagnostics provider.
• Device information — device type, operating system, and push notification tokens when you use our mobile app.
• Usage data — in the web app, pages visited, features used, and timestamps for the purpose of providing and improving the service. The Link's mobile app uses no analytics and does not track the screens you move between.
• Records of what you open — in the client app, our servers keep a record, linked to you, of some of the things you open or read: for example each time your home screen loads, the news posts you read, and the documents, messages and requests you view. The records include the time, your IP address and your device type. We keep these so your firm has an audit trail of what has been seen and to keep the service secure; they are not used for advertising.

3. How we use your data

We process personal data for the following purposes:

• Providing and operating the platform, including messaging, task management, and project tracking.
• Sending push notifications, emails, and SMS messages triggered by platform activity.
• Authenticating users, including biometric login on mobile devices.
• Generating documents, reports, and approval workflows.
• Maintaining the security and integrity of the platform.
• Improving the platform based on aggregated usage patterns.
• Reading data automatically from photographs and documents you upload — for example pulling the date, amount and supplier off a receipt, or the transaction lines off a bank statement — so the information does not have to be typed in by hand.
• Transcribing voice notes, dictation and recorded calls into text.
• Checking a supplier's VAT number with HMRC when it appears on a receipt you photograph, and, when your firm posts a receipt, sending it to your business's own accounting software, which your firm has connected.
• Booking and holding meetings and video calls between you and your firm.
• Diagnosing crashes and errors so we can fix them.

Our legal bases for processing under UK GDPR are: performance of a contract (providing the service), legitimate interests (security, improvement), and consent (where applicable, e.g. push notifications, and access to your camera and microphone, which the app asks for at the point of use and which you can withdraw in your device settings at any time).

Automated processing. The extraction and transcription described above are automated, but they do not make decisions about you. Transcripts are saved as they are produced, and a recorded call's transcript may be summarised automatically, with suggested next steps, for your firm's staff. What is read from a receipt is shown to you straight away, and a supplier's VAT number on it can be checked with HMRC automatically. Otherwise what is read from documents and photographs is presented to a person at your firm, who reviews and corrects it before it is used — with one exception your firm can choose: it can let receipts in pounds, under an amount it sets, that pass a set of automated checks be posted to your business's accounting software without that review. This is off unless it is turned on for your firm. There is no automated decision-making producing legal or similarly significant effects within the meaning of Article 22 of the UK GDPR.

4. Third-party services

We use the following third-party services to operate the platform. Data shared with each is limited to what is necessary for the specific function:

• Neon — database hosting (EU/UK region).
• Cloudflare — content delivery, file storage (R2), and DDoS protection.
• SendGrid — transactional email delivery.
• Firebase Cloud Messaging — push notifications to Android devices.
• Apple Push Notification service — push notifications to iOS devices.
• Railway — application hosting.
• Anthropic, OpenAI and Google — automated extraction of information from uploaded documents and photographs, transcription of voice notes and recorded calls, and summaries of recorded calls. Content is sent for processing and the result is returned to the platform. We use these services on terms that do not permit your content to be used to train their models.
• Sentry — crash and error diagnostics. Reports carry a hashed user identifier as described in section 2.
• Google Fonts — the typefaces the app displays. Your device fetches them from Google, which receives your IP address and device type when it does.
• HM Revenue & Customs — checking a supplier's VAT number read from a receipt; for that check only the VAT number is sent. When your firm asks HMRC to authorise it as your agent, your National Insurance number and postcode, or your business's VAT number and its registration date, are sent.
• Xero and Intuit QuickBooks — when your firm posts a receipt into your business's own Xero or QuickBooks, which the firm has connected: the supplier, date, amounts, VAT, a reference and description, and the receipt image are sent.
• Daily.co — video calls between you and your firm. Your name (or, if we hold no name, your email address) is shown to the other people on the call, and the call's audio and video pass through Daily. If your firm turns on transcription for a type of meeting, Daily also transcribes those calls and the transcript is stored with the meeting.
• Microsoft — when the member of staff you book a meeting with has connected their Outlook calendar, the meeting is added to it with the name of the client it is for, the phone number you gave for a phone call, and your note about the topic.
• Capitalise — credit reports on your company, where your firm offers them. We send the company's registration number and receive the company's credit profile; no personal data is sent.

We do not sell, rent, or trade your personal data to any third party.

5. Data retention

We retain your personal data for as long as your account or your firm's account is active, and for a reasonable period thereafter to comply with legal obligations, resolve disputes, and enforce agreements.

If you close your account in the client app, your sign-in is closed straight away and you are signed out on every device. Your firm keeps the records it holds about you as your accountant; to ask for those to be deleted, contact your firm or us (section 7).

Push notification tokens: when you sign out of the client app on a device, that device's token is removed, and closing your account removes all of yours. A token that Apple or Google reports as no longer valid — for example after the app is uninstalled — is removed when we next try to use it, and a weekly check removes those unused for 60 days that the provider no longer accepts.

6. Data security

All data transmitted between your device and our servers is encrypted using TLS (HTTPS). Data at rest is encrypted within our database and storage infrastructure. We use session-based authentication for staff users and token-based authentication for the client portal, with optional biometric verification on mobile devices.

7. Your rights

Under UK GDPR, you have the right to:

• Access — request a copy of the personal data we hold about you.
• Rectification — request correction of inaccurate data.
• Erasure — request deletion of your personal data where there is no compelling reason to continue processing.
• Restriction — request that we limit processing of your data in certain circumstances.
• Portability — request your data in a structured, machine-readable format.
• Objection — object to processing based on legitimate interests.

To exercise any of these rights, email enquiries@usethelink.com. We will respond within 30 days.

8. Cookies and local storage

The Link uses session cookies to keep you logged in. We use local storage and the Capacitor Preferences API on mobile devices to store your session and notification preferences. We do not use third-party tracking cookies or advertising cookies.

9. Children's privacy

The Link is a business application intended for use by professionals aged 18 and over. We do not knowingly collect personal data from children.

10. Changes to this policy

We may update this privacy policy from time to time. Material changes will be communicated through the platform or via email. The “last updated” date at the top of this page reflects when the policy was last revised.

11. Contact and complaints

If you have questions or concerns about this policy or our data practices, contact us at enquiries@usethelink.com.

If you are not satisfied with our response, you have the right to lodge a complaint with the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO).