Privacy Policy

Effective date and last updated: October 10, 2026

This Privacy Policy explains how Ethan McIntyre (“Parline”, “we”, “us”) collects, uses, shares, and protects personal information when you use the Parline bookkeeping application and the website at parline.app (the “Service”). Parline is run by one person in Michigan, USA. Questions: support@parline.app.

1. Information we collect

We collect information from you, from Google when you sign in, from other people who invite you to their books, and automatically when you use the Service. We do not run third-party analytics, advertising, tracking pixels, or session replay. We do count visits to our public pages with a small first-party counter, described in Section 1.5.

1.1 From you

• Profile. Your first and last name and an optional uploaded profile picture, which you can edit in your account settings. We also keep a timestamp of your last sign-in, whether you have finished or skipped onboarding, which guided tours you have completed, and whether we have sent you the welcome email.
• Your books (financial data). The content you enter: companies/“books” you create, chart of accounts, journal entries and their line items (amounts, debits/credits, descriptions, dates), tags, budgets, closing dates, owner names, and any notes. If you upload a logo or banner image, we store that image.
• Saved views and display preferences. The filters you save on the Transactions and Change History screens (a name and the filter settings), and display preferences such as light or dark mode, list layout, page size, and sort behavior. These belong to your account, not to a book.
• Import drafts and import jobs. If you use AI Import (see Section 3), the JSON you paste back is kept on our servers as a draft while you review it, and again as an import job (the entries, a status, and counts) while it is posted to your books, so you can resume if you close the tab. A draft is removed when you post or discard it.
• Team information. If you invite someone to your books - a colleague, or an accountant or bookkeeper through the “your accountant” sharing feature - we store the email address you enter and the role you assign, and we send that address an invitation email. Someone who keeps books for several people sees, for each of their clients, that client’s name and email address alongside the books shared with them.
• Support messages. If you contact us through the in-app help form, we keep your message together with your account email, the page you were on, the app version, and your browser’s user-agent string. If you email us instead, we keep the correspondence.
• Product feedback. If you fill in the in-app feedback survey, we keep your ratings and written answers, plus the page you were on and the app version. These are stored anonymously - without your name, email address, or account id - so we cannot tell who submitted a given response.
• Marketing preference. Whether you have opted in to product-update emails. We store your email address, when you subscribed, and (if you unsubscribe) when you unsubscribed.
• Terms acceptance. When you sign in under the notice on the sign-in page, we record which version of the Terms and this Policy you accepted and when.

1.2 From Google

Sign-in is through Google only. When you sign in, Google shares your name, email address, and profile-picture URL with us. We do not receive your Google password, and we do not ask for access to your Google contacts, calendar, Drive, or email.

1.3 From other members of your books

If someone invites you to their books, they give us your email address and the role they assign you. Once you are a member, actions you take in those books are recorded as described in Section 4 (Change History, notifications, and the edit lock).

If we email you ourselves to invite you to try Parline, we keep your email address, the first name we used, and the date we sent it, so that we do not ask you twice and can tell whether you joined. Reply and ask, and we will delete that record.

1.3a Roundtrip workbooks (Pro)

When you upload a Roundtrip workbook, it goes to a private storage folder that only admins of those books can read, and we delete it as soon as it has been read. The list of changes built from it is kept so you can review and apply it, and is deleted when you discard it or about two weeks after you started it (the next time you start another one). What you apply is recorded in Change History like any other edit.

1.4 Billing information

If you subscribe to Pro, our payment processor Stripe collects and processes your payment details. We do not receive or store your card number. We store a Stripe customer ID, your plan, subscription status, and billing-period dates.

1.5 Automatically

• Server logs. Our hosting provider (Vercel) and database provider (Supabase) generate server logs that include IP address, request time, pages or endpoints accessed, referring URL, and browser/device information. We use these for security, debugging, and reliability.
• Rate-limit counters. To stop abuse and runaway costs we count how often a signed-in account uses certain actions (exports, imports, invitations, checkout, support and feedback forms, creating books). The counter is keyed by your account id, not your IP address, and is kept for about an hour.
• Public-page visit counter. On our public pages (home, Learn, log in, sign up, Help, Terms and Privacy) we run our own small counter so we can tell real visitors from automated traffic and see which buttons are pressed. It records the page, the time, the visitor’s country (from the hosting provider), the host of the site that referred them, the label of a button or link pressed, and whether the request looks automated. It does not store your IP address: it keeps only a one-way hash of your IP address and browser type that is salted with the date, so it can group one day’s requests together but cannot identify you or follow you from one day to the next. It uses no cookies or browser storage, sends nothing to any third party, does not run inside your signed-in books, and is switched off if your browser sends Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control. These records are deleted after 90 days.
• Cookies and browser storage. See Section 5.

We do not knowingly collect special categories of data (such as health or biometric data). Please do not enter such data into free-text fields.

2. How we use information

We use personal information to:

• provide the Service - authenticate you, create and run your books, generate statements and exports, and coordinate access for the members you invite;
• process payments and manage your subscription through Stripe;
• communicate with you - send transactional email (a welcome message, invitations, notices about your books such as someone joining, leaving, or being invited, or a book being deleted, support replies, and billing email including the confirmation of your Pro subscription and its renewal terms); and, only if you opt in, send product-update (“marketing”) email, which always includes a one-click unsubscribe;
• provide support and respond to your requests;
• secure the Service - detect, prevent, and respond to fraud, abuse, security incidents, and technical problems, including rate limiting;
• improve the Service - fix bugs and decide what to build next from what you tell us in support messages and the anonymous feedback survey; and
• comply with law and enforce our Terms.

We do not sell your personal information. We do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising, and we do not use your books or other personal information to train artificial-intelligence models.

3. AI features - what we do not do

Parline itself does not call any artificial-intelligence or large-language-model service, and there is nowhere in Parline to upload a bank statement. AI Import works by copy and paste: Parline builds a block of text - a prompt, built in your browser from your own chart of accounts - for you to copy. You paste it into an AI tool of your own choosing, and you paste the tool’s answer back into Parline. AI Reconciliation and the AI Health Check work the same way. Their prompts contain transaction data from your books that you choose to copy out; Parline does not transmit it anywhere. The AI Health Check and AI Reconciliation sessions (your pasted results and notes) are stored only in your browser’s localStorage, not on our servers.

Whatever you paste into a third-party AI tool is governed by that tool’s terms and privacy policy, not this one. Parline only ever sees the result you paste back. The same is true of AI Reconciliation and the AI Health Check.

4. Who we disclose information to

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising. We disclose information to:

4.1 Service providers

These companies host and run the Service on our behalf. Each has its own privacy policy:

4.2 Other members of your books

Every set of books has one owner. The owner (and admins) can invite members as viewers, editors, or admins, and can share the books with an advisor by email. Members of a set of books can see:

• each other’s name, email address, and profile picture;
• the contents of the books, as far as their role allows;
• the Change History (audit log), which records the email address of whoever made each change and a before-and-after snapshot of the entry;
• in-app notifications, which record the name of the person who caused them; and
• the edit lock, which shows the name of whoever is currently editing.

Only invite people you are comfortable showing this to. Your inviter’s name and the book’s name are shown to you when you are invited.

4.3 The operator

The operator can see account-level data through an admin console, in order to run the service, give support, prevent abuse, and meet legal obligations: users (name, email, last sign-in), books and their members, billing status, support messages, marketing subscribers, anonymous feedback, and recent-activity metadata such as a book’s name, an entry’s date and its source. The console does not show transaction descriptions. The operator can also reach the database directly to fix problems or answer a support request.

4.4 Google, when your picture is displayed

If you use your Google profile picture, the image is loaded by other members’ browsers directly from Google’s servers, so Google can see those viewers’ IP addresses. Pictures and book banners you upload yourself are served from public storage addresses, so anyone who has the address of an uploaded picture or banner can view it. Do not upload an image you would not want to be public.

4.5 Legal, safety, and business transfers

• Legal and safety. We may disclose information if we believe in good faith that it is required by law, legal process, or a governmental request, or is necessary to protect the rights, property, or safety of Parline, our users, or the public, or to investigate fraud or a security incident.
• Business transfer. If Parline is involved in a merger, acquisition, financing, or sale of assets, information may be transferred as part of that transaction. We will require the recipient to honor this Policy or notify you of any material change.

5. Cookies and browser storage

Everything below is strictly necessary to run the Service or remembers a preference you set. We do not use advertising cookies or analytics cookies, and nothing here tracks you across other sites. (The public-page counter in Section 1.5 uses no cookies or browser storage at all.) Because of that, we do not show a cookie consent banner.

Which tours you have finished is also stored on your account on our servers, so we know which tours to suggest to you. You can clear the local items above at any time from your browser’s site-data settings.

6. Data retention and deletion

Deleting your account

Use Delete account on your account page. There is no grace period and no undo, so export anything you want to keep first. Deleting your account:

• cancels your Pro subscription and asks Stripe to delete your customer record (Stripe keeps past invoices);
• deletes your profile, your uploaded picture, the books you own and everything in them (including their banners), your memberships, your notifications, your support messages, your saved views and preferences, and your marketing subscription; and
• removes any pending invitation or advisor grant addressed to your email address.

If you own a book that other people can see, we will not delete your account until you transfer ownership or remove the other members, because deleting it would delete the book for everyone.

Some things do not go away, and we would rather say so:

• Your contributions to other people’s books stay in those books. Transactions, accounts, tags, and budgets you created in a book you do not own belong to that book’s owner. They remain, with the link to your account removed.
• Change History entries in other people’s books keep the email address that was recorded at the time. The Change History is part of that book’s audit trail and the owner’s record, not yours.
• Copies in routine backups remain until the backups roll off.
• We keep what we must to comply with the law, resolve a dispute, or prevent fraud, and Stripe keeps its own invoice records.

You can also ask us by email to delete your account.

7. Your choices and rights

We offer these to everyone who uses Parline, whatever your state or country requires of us:

• Access and portability - export your books from within the app: a CSV export of your transactions on the free plan, and on Pro an Excel export of transactions and of the chart of accounts, a full data export of the books, and the year-end package. For personal data that is not in a book (for example your profile or support messages), email us.
• Correction - fix inaccurate data. Your name and picture are editable in account settings; everything in your books is editable by you.
• Deletion - delete your account and its data yourself, at any time, from Delete account on your account page (see Section 6). Email us if you would rather we did it.
• Turn off marketing email - at any time, with the one-click unsubscribe link in any such email or the toggle in your account settings.
• Cancel Pro - at any time from Account > Billing > Manage billing.
• Complain - raise it with us first at support@parline.app, or with your state attorney general.

8. California residents (CCPA/CPRA)

This section applies if you are a California resident. In the last 12 months we have collected the following categories of personal information:

Why we collect it is described in Section 2, and who receives it (service providers, other members of your books, the operator, and as required by law) in Section 4. We do not sell or share personal information, as those terms are defined in California law, and we have not done so in the last 12 months. We do not knowingly sell or share the personal information of anyone under 18.

You have the right to:

• know what personal information we collect, use, and disclose about you, and get a copy of it;
• delete your personal information (subject to the exceptions in Section 6);
• correct inaccurate personal information;
• limit the use of sensitive personal information. We do not use sensitive personal information for anything beyond running your account, so there is nothing to limit; and
• not be discriminated against for exercising these rights. We will not deny you the Service, charge you a different price, or give you a lower quality of service for making a request.

How to make a request. Email support@parline.app from the address on your account, or use the in-app tools in Section 7. How we verify you: we match the request to the email address on the account, and we may ask you to sign in or to confirm details only the account holder would know. We will not ask for more than we need.

Authorized agents. You may use an authorized agent. We will need written permission from you, and we may still verify your identity with you directly.

Timing. We will confirm your request and respond within 45 days. If we need more time, we will tell you why and may extend by up to another 45 days.

9. Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control

We do not track you across other websites or online services over time, and we do not use your information for advertising. So we treat all visitors the same whether or not their browser sends a Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control signal; there is nothing for the signal to switch off.

10. Other US states and international users

Other US states. Some states, such as Colorado, Connecticut, Texas, and Virginia, give residents similar rights to access, correct, delete, and port their data, and to appeal a refusal. We offer those rights to everyone (Section 7); to appeal a decision, reply to our response by email and we will re-review it.

International users. Parline is run from the United States and is intended for use in the United States. We do not offer or market it to people in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, or Switzerland. If you use it from another country, your information is processed in the United States, where data-protection law may differ from your country’s.

11. Security

We use technical and organizational measures to protect personal information, including encryption in transit (HTTPS), database row-level security that scopes each book’s data to its members, role-based access controls, and Google sign-in rather than passwords we store. No method of transmission or storage is completely secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security. If we become aware of a breach affecting your personal data, we will notify you and the relevant authorities as required by law. To report a vulnerability, see our security.txt.

12. Children

The Service is for people 18 and older. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 18. If you believe a child has provided us personal information, contact us and we will delete it.

13. Marketing email

We send product-update email only to people who opt in (from account settings), from a separate address at news.parline.app. Every marketing email has a working one-click unsubscribe link, and unsubscribing takes effect promptly. You cannot opt out of essential transactional email (such as billing notices, invitations you asked for, or security alerts) while you have an account, because we need it to run the Service.

14. Changes to this Policy

We may update this Policy. If a change is material, we will notify you by email or in the app before it takes effect. The effective date at the top shows the current version. Your continued use of the Service after a change takes effect means you accept the updated Policy.

15. Contact

Ethan McIntyre
829 Tappan Ave, Ann Arbor, MI 48104, United States
Privacy, data requests, and general support: support@parline.app