Glysten Books Privacy Policy

Last updated: 2026-09-23

1. Scope, and the one thing that decides everything else

This policy explains what personal information Glysten Books handles, and what we as the Provider do and do not see. It forms part of the Terms of Service.

Almost every answer below depends on which deployment you have:

Self-Managed Deployment — Glysten Books runs on infrastructure you control. Your books, your users' accounts, and everything in them stay on your systems. We do not receive them, and we cannot see them. For that data you are the controller and we are not a processor of it at all; this policy then describes only our website and your dealings with us as a customer.
Hosted Deployment — we run Glysten Books for you. Your books are on infrastructure we control, so we hold that data and Sections 5 to 11 apply in full. You remain the controller of it; we process it on your instructions.

2. Who we are

The Provider of Glysten Books, as identified in the Terms of Service. Contact details are in Section 14.

3. Our website

Our public website describes the product. It has no forms and collects nothing from you: it sets no cookies, runs no analytics, advertising or tracking, and makes no requests to anyone else's servers — its fonts are served from our own.

4. Cookies

Glysten Books sets one cookie: a session cookie that keeps you signed in. It is HttpOnly and SameSite=Strict, it is not readable by scripts, and it is not sent to other sites. It is strictly necessary to use the application.

We set no advertising, analytics, or tracking cookies anywhere, so there is nothing here to opt out of.

5. What Glysten Books stores about the people who use it

Whether this reaches us depends on your deployment (Section 1). In either case, a Glysten Books installation stores:

What	Why
Username (an email address) and display name	To identify who is signed in and label their entries
A hash of the password — never the password itself	To sign you in
Two-factor secrets and recovery codes, if enabled	To protect the account
Role, and per-entity access grants	To decide what each person may see
Session records: a token hash, IP address, browser user-agent, timestamps	To keep you signed in and let you end a session
Known sign-in locations: IP addresses, when first and last seen, any label	To recognise a familiar device and hold an unfamiliar one for approval
Held sign-in attempts: IP address, browser user-agent, time, outcome	To let an account owner approve or refuse an unrecognised sign-in
Failed sign-in counts and lockout times	To slow down password guessing
An audit log of actions taken in the books	So an account owner can see who changed what
Each acceptance of these terms: which revision, when, IP address, browser user-agent	To show who agreed to which terms
Your choice about letting the Help assistant read the books, and when you made it	So it reads them only if you said it may
How many questions you asked the Help assistant each day, and what they cost	To apply usage limits
Keys you create for AI apps — stored only as a hash — and when each was last used	So you can see every connection and revoke it

Glysten Books sends no usage analytics or telemetry to us in either deployment. What its AI features send, and to whom, is in Sections 8 and 11.

6. Personal information about other people, inside your books

This one deserves saying plainly. Your books can contain personal information about people who are not Glysten Books users and have never heard of us — customers, vendors, tenants, employees, partners and shareholders. Depending on what you use, that can include names, addresses, bank transaction detail, receipts and statements you attach, and taxpayer identification numbers, including Social Security numbers — for partners and shareholders if you produce Schedules K-1, and for the people you pay if you record W-9s to prepare Forms 1099.

Taxpayer identification numbers from W-9s are held apart from the rest of the books, shown on screen only as their last four digits, and used in full only to build a 1099 file. They are never sent to an AI provider or to an AI app you connect. A record of each 1099 file Glysten Books prepares is kept permanently, as a tax record.

You decide what goes in, why, and how long it stays. You are the controller of it, and you are responsible for having a lawful basis to hold it and for meeting your own obligations to those people.
In a Self-Managed Deployment we never receive any of it.
In a Hosted Deployment we store it on your behalf. We do not use it for any purpose of our own. We access it only to operate the service, fix a fault, provide support you have asked for, or comply with the law.

Given what this data is, keep the access grants in Glysten Books narrow, and treat an export of your books as the sensitive document it is.

7. How we use information, and why

To provide, operate and secure Glysten Books — our contract with you, and our legitimate interest in a service that works and is not broken into.
To authenticate people and detect unauthorised access — our legitimate interest in security, and yours.
To take payment and keep records — our contract with you and our legal obligations.
To answer questions you ask the Help assistant, and — only where you have turned it on — to read your books to answer them (Section 11).
To answer support requests you send us.
To send you service messages about outages, security, or changes to these terms. These are not marketing and you cannot opt out of them while you hold an account.

We do not sell personal information, we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising, and we do not use your books to train artificial-intelligence or machine-learning models. We have never done so.

8. Who else is involved

Cloud hosting (for example DigitalOcean), for a Hosted Deployment only. They store the data; they do not use it.
An AI provider — today Anthropic, or Google for an installation set up for Gemini — when you use an AI feature. It receives what that feature sends (Section 11). On a Hosted Deployment we use its paid, commercial service, under terms that do not permit it to train its models on what we send. On a Self-Managed Deployment the provider is yours to choose, under your agreement with it.
An AI app you connect to your books, such as Claude or ChatGPT. It reads what you can see and sends it to its own provider under your agreement with that provider, not ours.
A payment processor, which handles subscription payments under its own terms. We do not store full card numbers.
SimpleFIN Bridge, only if you connect a bank feed. Your bank transaction data passes through SimpleFIN under their privacy policy. Read it before you connect an account.
Professional advisers, or a successor in a merger or sale of the business. A buyer would be bound by this policy for information collected under it.
Law enforcement or a regulator, where we are legally required. If we are compelled to disclose data belonging to a Hosted Deployment customer, we will tell you unless the law forbids it.

A current list of subprocessors is available on request.

9. Where information is held

For a Hosted Deployment, in the United States. We will not move Your Data outside the United States without notice to you.

10. How long we keep it

Sign-up enquiries: up to two years, then deleted.
Account and billing records: for the life of the account, and afterwards for as long as we need them for tax, accounting and legal purposes — generally seven years.
Session, known-IP and held-sign-in records: these age out automatically; sessions expire, and the rest are kept while they are useful for security.
Acceptances of these terms: kept as a legal record, including after an account is closed or a person is removed, with the account records above.
Help assistant conversations: not kept by Glysten Books' server at all. Today's conversation is kept in your own browser, and the daily counts of questions and their cost are kept with the account records.
1099 files Glysten Books prepared: kept permanently, as a tax record.
Your books, in a Hosted Deployment: for thirty days after your subscription ends, so you can ask for a copy. After that we may delete them permanently, and from backups as those rotate.
Your books, in a Self-Managed Deployment: entirely up to you. We hold no copy to delete.

11. Automated decisions, and where a person is still required

Glysten Books automates bookkeeping, so it is fair to ask what it decides by itself.

Categorisation rules and payee matching suggest an account for a bank transaction based on how you have coded that payee before. A suggestion is only ever pre-filled into a dropdown.
Duplicate detection flags a transaction that looks like one already in your books. It flags; it never discards.
Tax computations total figures from entries you made and place them on a form. They are arithmetic, not judgement.

The Help assistant answers questions using an AI provider. Without your books it is sent Glysten Books' help text and your question. With your books — which is off until you turn it on for yourself — it is also sent the entries, figures, names and notes it reads to answer you, never more than your own access allows; a picture or document you attach goes with the question it is attached to. It can draft entries and propose changes, but each one waits for you to approve it.
Teaching Glysten Books a statement layout sends the AI provider an outline of the statement page in which names, addresses, account numbers and transaction descriptions are blanked; figures, dates and headings are sent as printed.

Nothing in Glysten Books posts to your books, files anything, or moves money on its own — not the rules, and not the AI. Every one of those is a person clicking a button. We do not make automated decisions that produce legal or similarly significant effects about anyone — no credit scoring, no eligibility decisions, no profiling for advertising — and we do not use your books to train artificial-intelligence or machine-learning models. The Terms of Service, Section 13, set out the AI features in full.

12. Security

For a Hosted Deployment we use commercially reasonable safeguards, including encryption in transit and at rest, access controls, and limiting staff access to those who need it. Passwords are stored only as hashes. Two-factor authentication is available and we recommend it.

No system is perfectly secure. If we become aware of a breach affecting your personal information we will notify you without undue delay, and notify regulators where the law requires.

For a Self-Managed Deployment the security of the machine, the database and the backups is yours. Glysten Books gives you the tools — hashed passwords, two-factor, held sign-ins, per-entity access, an audit log — but it cannot secure a server you have left open.

13. Your rights

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to know what personal information we hold about you, to get a copy, to correct it, to delete it, to limit how we use it, and not to be discriminated against for exercising any of those rights. California residents have these rights under the CCPA as amended by the CPRA; several other states provide similar ones.

You may also withdraw consent where we relied on it, and complain to a data protection authority in the place you live if you think we have handled your information badly. You do not have to come to us first, though we would rather hear from you and fix it.

We do not sell or share personal information for advertising, so there is no opt-out to offer.

To exercise a right, contact us at Section 14. We will verify your identity before we act, and respond within the time the law allows.

If your information is in someone else's books — you are a vendor, tenant, customer or partner of a Glysten Books customer — then that customer, not us, controls it, and you should contact them. If you contact us about a Hosted Deployment we will pass your request on to them. In a Self-Managed Deployment we have no access to their books and cannot help beyond telling you so.

14. Contact

Privacy questions and rights requests: [ADD CONTACT EMAIL AND POSTAL ADDRESS]

15. Children

Glysten Books is business software and is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 18. If you believe a child has given us information, tell us and we will delete it.

16. Changes

We may update this policy. For material changes we will give notice through the product or by email before they take effect, and the "Last updated" date above tells you which revision this is. Prior revisions are available on request.