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Privacy Policy

Introduction

This Privacy Policy describes how Argo Books ("we", "us", or "our") collects, uses, and discloses your information when you use our website and community forums (collectively, our "Website").

We respect your privacy and are committed to protecting your personal data. This Privacy Policy will inform you about how we look after your personal data when you visit our Website or use our Argo Books application and tell you about your privacy rights and how the law protects you.

Website Information

To help us improve the Argo Books website and provide you with our services, we collect the following types of information:

Data We Collect on the website

Account Information

When you register for an account on our Website, we collect:

  • Username.
  • Email address.
  • Password (stored as a one-way hash, never in plain text).

User-Generated Content

We store content that you create or upload when using our Website, including:

  • Posts and comments in the community forum.
  • Up-votes and down-votes in the community forum.

License Information

When you purchase a license key through our Website, we store:

  • Your email address associated with the license.
  • Purchase date and license details.

Subscription Information

When you subscribe to Argo Books Premium, we store:

  • Subscription status and billing cycle.
  • Payment method type (Stripe, PayPal, or Square).
  • Transaction IDs for payment processing.
  • Subscription start and end dates.

We do not store credit card numbers. Payment processing is handled securely by our payment providers.

Payment Portal Information

When you use the payment portal to publish invoices for online payment, we store:

  • Invoice data (customer name, amounts, line items, due dates).
  • Connected payment provider type (Stripe or Square).
  • Authentication tokens for your connected payment accounts.
  • Payment status for each published invoice.

We do not store your customers' credit card or bank details. All payment processing is handled directly by the connected payment provider.

Free Receipt Scanner

The free receipt scanner on our Website sends the image you upload to Google Gemini to be read and returns the result to your browser. The image is deleted from our server as soon as it has been sent onward, and neither the image nor what was read from it is kept. Submissions are checked by Cloudflare Turnstile so that the scanner cannot be used by automated traffic.

Technical Information

We automatically collect certain information when you visit our Website:

  • IP address (used for security and to determine your general location).
  • Browser type and version.
  • Operating system.
  • Referral source.
  • Page views.

How We Use Your Website Information

We use the information we collect from our Website for the following purposes:

Provide and maintain our Website: Including registering you for an account, providing customer support, and processing transactions.

Improve our Website: We analyze usage patterns to enhance our website and products.

Communication: We may use your email address to send you important notices, such as changes to our terms, conditions, and policies. We may also send you messages related to your account activity or inquiries.

Security: We use information to verify accounts, prevent fraud, and monitor for suspicious or illegal activity.

Website Data Retention

We retain your personal information only for as long as necessary to fulfill the purposes for which we collected it, including for the purposes of satisfying any legal, accounting, or reporting requirements.

We reserve the right to remove accounts that have been inactive for an extended period. If we ever remove an inactive account, we will first email the registered address with instructions on how to keep the account active, and give you an opportunity to respond before any data is deleted.

When you choose to delete your account, it is scheduled for permanent deletion after a 30-day grace period. Signing back in during that period cancels the deletion. After the grace period, the account and its associated data are permanently removed from our system.

Website Data Security

We have implemented appropriate security measures to prevent your personal data from being accidentally lost, used, or accessed in an unauthorized way, altered, or disclosed. We limit access to your personal data to employees.

Your Rights Regarding Website Data

Depending on your location, you may have certain rights regarding your personal information, including:

  • Access: You can request copies of your personal information.
  • Correction: You can ask us to rectify inaccurate personal information.
  • Erasure: You can ask us to delete your personal information in certain circumstances.
  • Restriction: You can ask us to restrict the processing of your personal information.
  • Data portability: You may have the right to obtain and reuse your personal information across different services.

Website Cookie Policy

Our Website uses cookies and similar tracking technologies to track activity on our Website and hold certain information. Cookies are files with a small amount of data which may include an anonymous unique identifier.

You can instruct your browser to refuse all cookies or to indicate when a cookie is being sent. However, if you do not accept cookies, you may not be able to use some portions of our Website.

Argo Books Desktop Application Data

Usage data is collected to help us improve Argo Books. We use it to understand how the desktop software is used, identify and fix bugs, diagnose performance issues, prioritize new features, and optimize the app for different regions. Usage data is collected by all installations of Argo Books and is uploaded to our servers while the application runs and when you close it. You remain in control of your data: you can view what has been collected on your device at any time, and delete it at any time.

Most of what we collect describes how the application behaves and cannot be traced back to you. There are two exceptions:

  • Each device is given an identifier so we can tell one device's activity apart from another's. It is a one way hash of an identifier your operating system already holds: the Cryptography MachineGuid on Windows, the platform UUID on macOS, and the machine id on Linux. We cannot reverse the hash to recover that value, and it is not derived from your name or your email, nor is it linked to your Argo Books account. It survives reinstalling Argo Books, and every installation on that computer shares it.
  • If you create or open a company, we collect the business profile described below, which includes the company name you entered.

Data We Collect in the Desktop Software

We collect this for two reasons: to find what is broken or slow and fix it, and to see which parts of Argo Books people use so that we know what to build next. The desktop application collects:

  • Error data: When something goes wrong, what kind of failure it was and which part of our own program it happened in, so that we can find it and fix it. This points at our own code, never at your files or what is in them. Where we expect a problem and record it as a warning, we also send a short description that we wrote ourselves. The text of an error produced by your computer or by another program is never sent.
  • Startup timing: How long the application took to open, so we can find out how slow it is on hardware we do not have.
  • Session data: When you opened and closed the application, how long it stayed open, which version you are running, and whether you are on Windows, macOS or Linux.
  • Outside services: Which service the application contacted (Google Sheets, Google Gemini, Open Exchange Rates, or receipt scanning), how long it took to answer, and whether it worked. What each of those services receives is listed under "Who Else Handles Your Data".
  • Feature usage: Which features you use, such as scanning a receipt or generating a report, so that we know what to improve.
  • Export data: The kind of export you ran (Excel, Google Sheets, backup and so on), how long it took, and how large the file was.
  • Geographic data: Country, region and timezone, so that we know where Argo Books is being used.
  • Timestamp: When the action occurred.
  • Business profile: See the section immediately below.

Business Profile Data

When you create or open a company in the desktop application, we collect the details you entered describing that business:

  • Company name.
  • Business type (sole proprietorship, partnership, corporation, and so on).
  • Industry.
  • Country the business operates in.
  • Currency the books are kept in.
  • Language the application is displayed in.

We collect this to understand what kinds of businesses use Argo Books, which industries, currencies and languages to prioritize, and which markets to build for. We do not sell it, share it with advertisers, or use it to contact you. If you use the built-in sample company, none of this is sent: its details ship with the demo file and are the same on every install.

We recognize that for a sole trader a company name is often a personal name. If you would rather this was not collected, use a business name that is not your own when you create the company, or email us at contact@argorobots.com and we will delete what has already been collected for your installation.

Receipt Scanning, Bank Statements and Spreadsheet Import

These features cannot run on your computer alone, so the file you give them leaves your device. When you scan a receipt, the image is sent to our server, which passes it to Google Gemini and returns the vendor, date, totals and line items that were read from it. A bank statement in PDF form is always read this way. A spreadsheet, and a bank statement in CSV or spreadsheet form, go the same way only when the built in importer cannot read the file on its own. Our server holds the Google API key so that your copy of Argo Books does not have to, and it passes the file through without storing it.

This means the contents of a receipt you scan, of a bank statement read this way, and of a spreadsheet imported this way, are processed by Google. Their handling of it is governed by the Gemini API terms. All three are optional, and anything they produce can be typed in by hand instead.

What Stays On Your Computer

Your company file lives on your own computer. Your ledger, invoices, customers, suppliers and payroll records, including employee names, social insurance numbers and pay history, are written there and are never uploaded to us. Backups are written to a folder you choose on your own machine. When you set a password on a company file, that file is encrypted with AES-256. The only exception is the one described above: files you hand to receipt scanning, bank statement import or spreadsheet import.

What We Never Collect

In the usage data described above we never collect financial data, transaction data, customer names, vendor names, file paths, or document contents. We do not collect city-level location. Your IP address is visible to our server during the upload itself (as with any web request) and is used to derive your country and region, but the IP address itself is not stored alongside the collected data. Apart from the business profile above, the data collected describes how the application is used, not what you use it for.

Usage data from the application is kept apart from the analytics on our Website, with one deliberate exception. When you download Argo Books from our Website, the download link carries a signed token derived from your website visitor id. The application sends that token once, the first time it runs, so that we can tell which advertisement, video or link led to an install. That single event joins one website visit to one installation. The token is never sent again, and nothing else you do in the application is connected to your website browsing.

How We Use This Data

We use this data to:

  • Understand how users interact with our desktop software globally.
  • Identify and fix errors and bugs that users encounter.
  • Identify performance issues and bottlenecks in different regions.
  • Prioritize feature development based on actual usage patterns.
  • Optimize the software for different geographic regions and network conditions.
  • Understand which kinds of businesses use Argo Books, so we build for the right ones.
  • Improve the overall user experience.

We do not sell this data, share it with advertisers, or use it to build advertising profiles.

Managing Your Data

Usage data is collected automatically and cannot be turned off in the application, but you remain in control of it:

  • View your data: Open Settings, go to the General tab, and press View Data under Usage Data. This opens the folder on your computer holding the events that are waiting to be sent, and events are removed from it once they have been uploaded. The files are plain JSON that you can read or copy.
  • Delete your data: Delete All Data, beside that button, removes every piece of usage data stored on your computer. That clears the local copy. To also remove data that has already been uploaded to our servers, email contact@argorobots.com and we will delete it.
  • Ask what we hold: Email us from the same address and we will tell you what has been collected for your installation, and delete it on request. Depending on where you live you may have a legal right to this, and we will honour it regardless of where you live.

Google API Services

When you use the 'Export to Google Sheets' feature in our desktop application, we request access to your Google account to:

  • Create spreadsheets in your Google Drive.
  • Write chart data to those spreadsheets.

We use this data only to perform the export you requested. We do not store, share, or use your Google data for any other purpose. All data remains in your Google Drive under your control.

Our use of information received from Google APIs adheres to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.

The first time you use the Google Sheets export feature, you will be prompted to sign in to your Google account and grant permission to the application. You can revoke this access at any time through your Google Account permissions page.

Who Else Handles Your Data

We use the services below to run Argo Books. Each one receives only what it needs for the job named beside it, and none of them receives your company file.

  • Google: receipt images and imported spreadsheets, so that they can be read, and your Google Drive only when you use Export to Google Sheets.
  • Stripe, PayPal and Square: paying for Premium, and running the subscription afterwards.
  • Stripe and Square: invoice payments your own customers make through the payment portal.
  • Resend: sending email, such as invoices, account notices and license keys.
  • Cloudflare: checking that form and scanner submissions come from a person.
  • Open Exchange Rates: currency rates, requested without sending anything that describes you.

We do not sell your data and we do not share it with advertisers.

Where Your Data Is Held

Our website, our database and the usage data described above are held on servers in Canada.

The services listed above operate internationally, so some data is processed outside Canada. A receipt you scan is read by Google, a payment you make is handled by Stripe, PayPal or Square, and email is sent through Resend, each under that provider's own safeguards. Your company file is not sent to any of them.

Who We Are and Which Law Applies

Argo Books is operated from Canada, and Canadian privacy law applies to the data described in this policy. If you live somewhere that grants you additional rights over your personal data, such as the United Kingdom or the European Union, we will honour the rights listed above wherever you live rather than asking you to show where you are. To exercise any of them, email contact@argorobots.com.

Children's Privacy

Our Website does not address anyone under the age of 18 ("Children"). We do not knowingly collect personally identifiable information from anyone under the age of 18. If you are a parent or guardian and you are aware that your Child has provided us with personal data, please contact us. If we become aware that we have collected personal data from children without verification of parental consent, we take steps to remove that information from our servers.

Changes to This Privacy Policy

We may update our Privacy Policy from time to time. We will notify you of any changes by posting the new Privacy Policy on this page and updating the "Last updated" date.

You are advised to review this Privacy Policy periodically for any changes. Changes to this Privacy Policy are effective when they are posted on this page.

Contact Us

If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy, please contact us:

Last updated: October 5, 2026