Privacy notice
Who controls your data
Ismail Software Ltd (company number 17515047, registered in England and Wales) trades as Fileyear and is the data controller for the personal data described in this notice. You can contact us at team@ismailsoftware.co.uk.
What we collect, why, and our lawful basis
We only collect what a filing needs. The table below is complete: if something isn’t listed here, Fileyear doesn’t collect it.
| What | Why | Lawful basis |
|---|---|---|
| Your email address | To send your receipt, filed copies, deadline reminders you asked for, and (if you create an account) a sign-in link | Performance of a contract; consent for reminders you opt into |
| Your account, if you create one: your email, your passkeys (the public half only; the private key never leaves your device), the companies you file for, your saved cards (held by Stripe) and settings such as text size | To sign you in, keep your companies and filings together, and let Autopilot prepare next year’s filings for you to approve | Performance of a contract |
| Your company’s public Companies House data (name, number, directors, PSCs, SIC codes, filing history) | To pre-fill your filing, check it against the register, and work out what’s due | Legitimate interests: this is already public register data, read directly from Companies House |
| Bank transaction data: dates, descriptions, amounts, payment type and running balance, from a statement you upload | To sort your transactions into accounting categories and prepare your accounts | Performance of a contract |
| Figures from bookkeeping software you connect (Xero, QuickBooks, FreeAgent or Sage): your accounts, their balances and your organisation’s name, read-only | To prepare your accounts from your books. We read only; we never change anything in your bookkeeping software | Performance of a contract |
| Payee names, account names and amounts from your bank transactions or books | Sent to our AI provider to suggest a category for items our own rules can’t place with confidence. You check, and can change, every suggestion before anything is filed. | Performance of a contract |
| What you type into the help box, and the help emails you send us | To answer your question: a typed question goes to our AI provider with a few facts about your filing so it can pick a short reply; “Email a person” sends the full detail to our support team | Performance of a contract |
| For accountants: your practice’s name, its team members’ names and emails, and its client list (company numbers and, where you add them, directors’ emails) | To run your practice account, invite your team and prepare your clients’ filings | Performance of a contract; legitimate interests for the client details you add |
Usage statistics: a random visitor number (the fileyear_visitor cookie), the pages, steps and errors reached, device type and where a visit came from | To see what works, what breaks and which marketing brings customers, so we can improve Fileyear | Legitimate interests; you can turn it off on the cookie policy page |
| Fileyear Rewards: your referral code, who used it, and your credit | To give the £10 discount and the £20 credit, and to stop a code being used for a company connected to its owner (checked against Companies House data we already hold) | Performance of a contract; legitimate interests (preventing misuse) |
| Your Companies House authentication code, and the HMRC Government Gateway user ID, password and UTR for your company (or, for your own Self Assessment, your own) | To submit your filing to Companies House and HMRC, under your own logins, when you press submit | Performance of a contract, carried out on your explicit instruction |
| Card payment details | To take payment for the filing | Performance of a contract |
| Your own invoices and order records (what you bought, when, for how much) | To issue invoices and receipts and keep the records our own tax and accounting duties require | Legal obligation; legitimate interests |
Credentials: used once, never stored
Your Companies House authentication code and your HMRC Government Gateway details are accepted only on the request that submits your filing, used to build and send that one message, and then discarded. They are never written to our database or files, and they are stripped out of our logs before anything is recorded. Resubmitting a rejected filing asks for them again. If you enter them before you reach the submit step, your browser keeps them for that tab only (your HMRC password only until the page reloads), and forgets them when you close it.
AI processing
Fileyear uses an AI model in two places. First, to suggest a category for bank transactions or bookkeeping accounts that our own rules can’t place with confidence: for example, deciding whether a payment to “J Patel” looks like a supplier or a dividend. We send the model the payee or account name and the amounts involved. Second, to answer a question you type into the help box: we send your question and a few facts about the filing it is about (the company’s name and number, what is being filed, its status, dates and price, and any rejection reason). We never send your Companies House authentication code, HMRC logins or card details to the model. The model is Anthropic’s Claude, run for us by Amazon Web Services (Amazon Bedrock) under the same terms as the rest of our hosting: what we send is not used to train any model and is not shared with Anthropic. Every category suggestion is shown to you before anything is filed, and you can change it (see Automated decision-making, below).
Usage statistics
Fileyear counts how its pages and filing steps are used: which pages and steps are reached, where visits end, which errors appear, the kind of device, and where a visit came from (another site’s name, a campaign tag or a discount code), plus the price of a filing paid. A random number in the first-party fileyear_visitor cookie lets us tell returning visitors from new ones. It is all first-party, with nothing sent to Google, Meta or any other analytics company, and we never record your IP address, what you type, your logins or your bank details. We use it only to produce statistics that improve Fileyear, on the basis of our legitimate interests; you can turn it off at any time on our cookie policy page, and nothing is sent if your browser sends Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control.
Who else sees it (our processors)
| Processor | What for | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Amazon Web Services (AWS) | Hosting: our database, file storage and servers | AWS eu-west-2 (London), within the UK |
| Amazon SES | Sending email (receipts, reminders, sign-in links) | AWS eu-west-2 (London), within the UK |
| Stripe | Taking card payments. Your card number goes straight from your browser to Stripe. Fileyear’s own servers never see it. | May process data outside the UK; covered by Stripe’s standard contractual clauses |
| Amazon Bedrock (AWS), running Anthropic’s Claude | Suggesting a category for items our rules can’t place, and answering questions typed into the help box | Sent from AWS London; may be processed in AWS’s EU regions, which the UK recognises as adequate |
| Zoho Mail | Our support mailbox: the emails you send us, and the help requests sent from the help box | Zoho’s UK data centre |
Where a processor is outside the UK, we rely on their standard contractual clauses (or the UK’s International Data Transfer Addendum) as the safeguard required by UK GDPR Chapter V. Companies House and HMRC are not our processors: when you submit a filing, you are sending it to them directly, under your own credentials, as explained in our terms of service. Nor is the bookkeeping software you connect: you choose to let Fileyear read from it, and its own privacy notice covers what it holds.
How long we keep things
Fileyear keeps as little as possible, for as short a time as possible. This matches the retention actually built into the product, not a generic policy:
| What | Kept for |
|---|---|
| Bank transactions, figures and other working documents for a filing | 30 days after the filing is finished |
| A draft you start but never pay for | 90 days, then deleted |
| The prepared figures of a filing you paid for but haven’t finished (not yet submitted, or rejected) | Until 90 days after you last worked on it. We email you 14 days before; a paid filing not yet submitted is then cancelled and refunded in full before its figures are deleted |
| Companies House authentication codes, HMRC logins and card numbers | Never stored: used once, on the request that submits or pays, then discarded |
| Invoices, receipts and the order record | 6 years, as our own tax and company-law record-keeping duties require |
| Email and company number, for a deadline reminder you asked for | Until you unsubscribe |
| Your account (sign-in, passkeys, companies, settings) and, for accountants, your practice and client list | Until you delete it; deleting it removes them straight away from Fileyear, and from our backups as they roll off, within 35 days |
| Access to bookkeeping software you connect | For a one-off import, only while we read your books; we don’t keep it. If you turn on Autopilot, kept encrypted until you turn it off or disconnect |
| Emails you send us, and help requests from the help box | As long as we need them to help you, and no longer than 2 years |
| Usage statistics | Detailed records 13 months; after that only daily totals, which identify no one |
| Backups of everything above, kept so we can recover from a fault | 35 days, then overwritten |
| Our audit log of what happened (ids only, no names, emails or figures) | Kept as a technical record; carries no personal data to delete |
You can ask us to delete your working data at any time, or export it, without waiting for these periods to run out. See Your rights, below, and our complaints and contact page for how to ask.
Your rights
Under UK GDPR, you have the right to:
- Access the personal data we hold about you.
- Rectification of anything inaccurate or incomplete.
- Erasure of your data, subject to what we must keep by law (invoices and order records, for 6 years).
- Restriction of how we use your data in some circumstances.
- Object to processing based on our legitimate interests.
- Portability: a copy of your data in a common, machine-readable format.
You can exercise most of these yourself, immediately, from inside a filing you’re working on (see “Delete my data” and “Download my data” on your filing), or by emailing team@ismailsoftware.co.uk; see how we handle requests.
Automated decision-making
Fileyear does not make any decision about you using automation alone that has a legal or similarly significant effect. Our AI model only suggests a category for a bank transaction; it never files anything, and you confirm (or correct) every section of your accounts, every category, and every figure before you pay, and again before you submit. Nothing is sent to Companies House or HMRC without you pressing submit.
Keeping your data secure
Your data travels encrypted (HTTPS) and is stored encrypted, and the bookkeeping access Autopilot keeps is encrypted again on its own (AES-256). Only the people who run Fileyear can reach your data, and only when they need to. Your Companies House and HMRC credentials are never stored, and personal details are removed from our logs before anything is recorded. If a breach ever put your data at risk, we would tell you and the ICO as the law requires.
Children
Fileyear is for company directors and people they authorise, aged 18 or over. We do not knowingly collect data about children.
Complaints
If you’re unhappy with how we’ve handled your data, please tell us first. See complaints and contact. You can also complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) at ico.org.uk or on 0303 123 1113.
Changes to this notice
If we change what we collect or why, we update this page and the date above, and if the change matters to you, we email you before it takes effect.