Privacy Policy

Who we are

BattleBooks is a done-for-you bookkeeping, payroll, and tax-preparation service operated by Design Built Renos Ltd, operating as BattleBooks ("BattleBooks", "we", "us"). We take the privacy of your business and financial information seriously — it's the core of what you trust us with. This policy explains what we collect, why, who we share it with, and the choices you have. It is written to comply with Canada's Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) and applicable provincial privacy law.

We have a designated Privacy Officer accountable for our compliance with this policy and applicable privacy law. Questions, requests, or complaints: hello@battlebooks.ca with "Privacy" in the subject line — privacy requests go straight to the Privacy Officer.

What we collect

• Contact information — your name, business name, email, phone number, mailing address, and date of birth (used to confirm you're 18+ and on your income-tax documents), when you fill out a form, create an account, or contact us.
• Account information — your email and a password (stored by Google Firebase Authentication as a secure hash — we never see or store your password itself).
• Business & financial records — the documents you send us to do your books: receipts, invoices, bank and credit-card statements, payroll details, and tax information. If we run your payroll, this can include employee information such as Social Insurance Numbers and banking details, which we protect with additional application-level encryption.
• Payment card details — collected and stored by our payment processor, Helcim. Your card number never touches our servers.
• Technical basics — standard web logs (IP address, browser type, pages visited) needed to run and secure the site. We do not run advertising trackers.

How we use it

• • To provide the service — keeping your books, preparing payroll, and building your filing-ready GST/HST, payroll, and year-end tax packages.
• • To communicate with you about your books, deadlines, and account.
• • To bill your subscription and manage your account.
• • To meet our own legal obligations.
• • With your consent, to send you marketing email — every marketing message includes an unsubscribe link, per Canada's Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL).

We never sell your information, and we never share it for anyone else's marketing.

Service providers we rely on

We use a small set of vetted providers to run BattleBooks. Each receives only what it needs to do its job:

• Google Cloud / Firebase — hosting, authentication, and our database. Your books, records, and documents are stored in Canada — Google's Montréal region (northamerica-northeast1). Some supporting processing (sign-in, receipt AI) runs on Google's US infrastructure.
• Helcim — payment processing (a Canadian company). Handles your card details and recurring billing.
• Google Gemini — receipt OCR. Images of receipts you submit are processed to extract the text (amounts, dates, vendors); extraction output is reviewed by a person.

Some of these providers process data in the United States. Where data leaves Canada, it remains protected by contractual safeguards, but it may be subject to the laws of the jurisdiction where it is processed.

How long we keep it

We keep your records for as long as your account is active, and afterwards only as long as reasonably needed for legal, tax, and audit purposes. Canada Revenue Agency guidance generally requires business records to be kept for six years — your original source documents remain yours, and keeping the originals remains your responsibility. When retention is no longer required, we delete or irreversibly anonymize the data.

Your rights

• • Access — ask us what personal information we hold about you and get a copy.
• • Correction — ask us to fix anything inaccurate.
• • Withdrawal of consent — withdraw consent to optional uses (like marketing) at any time.
• • Deletion — ask us to delete your data, subject to the legal retention obligations above.
• • Complaint — contact us first at hello@battlebooks.ca; you also have the right to complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada.

How we protect it

All data is encrypted in transit (TLS) and at rest. Access is restricted to the people who work on your books. Especially sensitive fields — like Social Insurance Numbers and banking details used for payroll — are protected with an additional layer of application-level encryption. Card details are handled entirely by Helcim and never stored by us.

Cookies

This site uses only what's essential to function (for example, keeping you logged in to the app). We don't use advertising cookies or cross-site trackers.

If something goes wrong

If a security incident ever affects your information in a way that creates a real risk of significant harm, we will notify you directly and without unreasonable delay, tell you what happened and what we're doing about it, and report it to the appropriate privacy regulator as the law requires.

Changes to this policy

If we make material changes, we'll update this page and note the new effective date, and we'll notify active clients by email. Continued use of the service after a change means you accept the updated policy.