Security & data access
What OpenBooks sees. What it can’t do.
The map of the data OpenBooks touches — and the boundary it does not cross.
What OpenBooks owns. What a person decides.
OpenBooks does the recurring work. A person keeps the judgment. That line is the whole security story. It does not move.
OpenBooks owns
- Reading your transactions
- Classifying and categorizing
- Gathering evidence
- Maintaining the Financial Record
- Drafting filings and reports
A person decides
- Moving money (never OpenBooks)
- Signing filings (a person does)
- Submitting filings (a person does)
- Rewriting sealed records (append-only; even on our own instruction)
- Legal judgment
What OpenBooks reads
OpenBooks reads only what you connect or hand it. Each row below is a thing it reads, and why.
- Your transactions. The deposits and expenses in the account you connect. OpenBooks categorizes each one.
- Receipts and evidence. Files you upload, or documents you point it to. It attaches each to the matching record.
- Filing history. Public records already posted on state registrar sites.
- Approver identities. The names, roles, and emails of the people allowed to approve work.
When you connect a bank or accounting system, OpenBooks receives a read-only token. It never receives your login. More on that below.
What OpenBooks never does
Some of these are promises. Most are facts about the code. There is simply no path in the software to do them.
- Move, transfer, or spend money. No ACH, no wire, no card charge. There is no money-movement code.
- Submit a filing to any regulator. A person clicks submit.
- Sign a report or an attestation. A person signs.
- Store your bank login or password. It never receives one.
- Change a sealed record. The Financial Record is append-only and tamper-evident.
- Sell, share, or license your data.
- Train outside models on your private data.
Where your data lives
Your data sits in managed Postgres (Supabase), served through Vercel. Both run in United States regions.
It is encrypted in transit over HTTPS. It is encrypted at rest by those providers. Connection tokens get a second layer of AES-256-GCM encryption in our own code before they reach the database.
The database is multi-tenant. Access is checked on every request, and row-level security is defined on every table.
Who can see your data
Your authorized users see your data. That is the default.
OpenBooks staff have no routine access to your live data. If you open a support case and ask us to look, that access is time-bounded and recorded.
How a bank connection works
Your bank login never reaches OpenBooks. When bank connections are available, they use a read-only token held by the connection provider. OpenBooks holds a copy that can only read.
You can revoke it any time, from your bank or from your settings. Disconnection is immediate. You can export your data first, or have it purged.
Keep, export, or delete your data
You can export everything, as JSON or CSV, any time.
Ask us to delete, and your data is purged from live systems within 30 days. We keep the minimum a regulator requires, and nothing more.
Compliance status
We do not show badges we have not earned. Here is exactly where we stand.
| Standard | Where we are |
|---|---|
| SOC 2 Type II | OpenBooks does not currently hold SOC 2 certification. Scoping is underway. |
| GDPR / CCPA rights | Access, deletion, and export honored on request. |
| PCI DSS | Not applicable. OpenBooks does not process payment cards. |
| HIPAA | Not applicable. OpenBooks does not process health information. |
If something goes wrong
We notify you within 72 hours of a confirmed incident.
Report a security concern to hello@openbooks.fyi.
See the Financial Record.
The proof is a record you can open and check yourself.