BusyBee Hub

Privacy Policy

Last updated: 2026-10-07

This policy explains what personal data BusyBee Hub collects, why, who we share it with, how long we keep it and the rights you have. It covers our website, the BusyBee Hub app and our support service.

1. Who we are

BusyBee Hub is provided by BusyBee Hub Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales with company number [COMPANY NUMBER], whose registered office is at [REGISTERED ADDRESS]. We're registered with the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) under registration number [ICO REGISTRATION NUMBER].

For questions about this policy or your personal data, email support@busybeehub.co.uk or use our contact form with the topic "Data & privacy".

2. Our role

We're the controller of the personal data we use to run BusyBee Hub for you: your account, your subscription, your support conversations and the security and technical data described below.

When you keep information about other people in BusyBee Hub (for example your customers, suppliers, tenants or CIS contractors), you decide what's recorded and why. For that data, your business is the controller and we're your processor, acting on your instructions under our Data Processing Agreement.

3. The data we collect

Your account

  • your first and last name, email address and password (stored only as a secure hash by our authentication provider)
  • if you sign in with Google or Apple, the account identifier and email address they share with us
  • two-factor authentication settings and hashed recovery codes
  • each version of our Terms and Privacy Policy you accepted or were told about, when and how you accepted it or were told about it, together with your account ID and your email address at the time
  • whether you opted in to marketing emails when you set up your business

Your business

  • business name, business type and the settings you choose
  • tax details you add, such as your National Insurance number, Unique Taxpayer Reference, VAT registration number and CIS status
  • property details, including addresses, ownership share and co-owner names, purchase and sale prices

Your records

  • invoices, estimates, credit notes, bills, expenses, payments, mileage, time entries, projects, journals and reports
  • receipts, logos, bank statements and CIS statements you upload
  • details of your customers, suppliers, tenants and contractors, such as names, company names, email addresses, phone numbers, addresses, VAT numbers, employer references and notes

Bank data

  • if you connect a bank through TrueLayer: account names, the last 2 digits of the sort code and last 4 digits of the account number, balances, and transactions (date, amount, description, merchant and the other details your bank provides), plus when your consent expires
  • if you import a CSV or PDF statement: the transactions and account details it contains

HMRC data

  • your Making Tax Digital obligations, the updates, declarations and VAT returns you send and HMRC's responses, including the email address of the person who sent each one
  • tax calculations, VAT liabilities and payments, CIS deductions, losses, and income HMRC holds for you, such as employment income (employer name and reference, pay and tax deducted), savings interest and dividends

Payments

  • see section 10

Finble

  • see section 11

Support

  • when you contact us: your topic, name, email address, optional phone number and business type, your message and our replies, plus the IP address and browser information sent with the form

Security and technical data

  • an activity log of important actions in your account, such as inviting a team member, connecting a bank or HMRC, or deleting an account, including IP address, browser information and the email address of the person who acted. Our authentication provider, Supabase, keeps its own record of sign-in events.
  • when you were last active in BusyBee Hub and which organisation you had open (only the latest, updated every minute while BusyBee Hub is open in a visible browser tab, and deleted with your account), which our support team can see for 15 minutes afterwards so they can reply to you or start a conversation
  • fraud prevention information HMRC requires us to send with each request we make to HMRC for you: a random device identifier stored in your browser, your IP address, time zone, screen and browser window size, browser details, your BusyBee Hub user ID and whether you signed in with two-factor authentication. We send this to HMRC and don't keep a copy of it.
  • error reports when something goes wrong in the app, which we configure not to include personal details such as IP addresses or cookies

Analytics (only if you allow it)

  • the page address (with any private link removed), the page you came from, your approximate location, device type, operating system and browser

We don't use advertising cookies, and we don't sell your personal data. If you allow analytics, we count page views with Vercel Web Analytics (see sections 4 and 6).

4. How we use it and our lawful bases

  • To provide BusyBee Hub (your account, records, bank feeds, HMRC connection, emails you send to your customers, and Finble): because it's necessary for our contract with you.
  • To take payment for subscriptions and send service emails, such as trial reminders, payment notices, notifications and the weekly Radar digest: contract.
  • To send your submissions to HMRC with the fraud prevention information it requires: legal obligation, and our contract with you.
  • To keep BusyBee Hub secure, prevent fraud and abuse (including checking that sign-ups and contact form submissions come from people, not bots), keep an activity log and fix errors: our legitimate interests in running a safe, reliable service.
  • To answer your support requests: contract, or our legitimate interests if you aren't a customer.
  • To keep financial records about our own business and meet legal requests: legal obligation.
  • To keep a record of the Terms you accepted, so we can deal with legal claims: our legitimate interests.
  • To send marketing emails: your consent, which you can withdraw at any time by turning off Marketing preferences in Settings → Profile, or by emailing us.
  • To count page views and see how the website is used (Vercel Web Analytics): your consent, which you can withdraw at any time from Cookie settings in the website footer or Settings → Profile.

5. Who we share it with

We share personal data only as needed to provide BusyBee Hub, with:

  • people in your organisation: team members see your business data according to their role; an accountant you invite sees everything, including your tax identifiers, and can file returns through your HMRC connection. You can remove anyone from Settings → Team at any time.
  • HMRC: when you connect to HMRC and send an update, declaration or return, or when we fetch your obligations and calculations. HMRC is responsible for how it uses that information. Every call also carries HMRC's required fraud-prevention headers, which include your sign-in email address alongside device and connection details, so HMRC can detect fraudulent submissions.
  • your customers: when you send them an invoice, estimate or reminder, or they pay online.
  • our BusyBee Hub support team: staff can view the account and organisation details they need to help you, such as members, subscription status and whether your HMRC and bank connections are working. They can't read your Finble conversations or see your National Insurance number, and staff actions such as suspending or deleting an account are recorded in our activity log.
  • service providers who process data for us, listed in section 6.
  • authorities, regulators or courts where the law requires it, and professional advisers under a duty of confidentiality.
  • a buyer or successor if our business is sold or reorganised, who would have to respect this policy.

6. Our service providers

  • Supabase, Inc.: database, authentication, file storage and background functions. Your data is hosted in London, UK.
  • Vercel, Inc.: hosts our website and app. The app runs in London, UK; pages may be delivered through Vercel's global network.
  • Vercel, Inc. (Web Analytics): counts page views, only if you allow analytics. It doesn't set cookies or build a profile of you, and isn't used for advertising.
  • Vercel AI Gateway (Vercel, Inc.) and Google: generate Finble's answers and read receipts and bank and CIS statements you upload. The model we currently use is Google's Gemini.
  • Resend: sends our emails and the invoices, estimates and reminders you send.
  • Stripe: processes subscription payments and online payments from your customers.
  • TrueLayer Limited: connects to your bank.
  • Cloudflare, Inc. (Turnstile): checks that sign-in, registration, password reset and contact forms are used by people, not bots.
  • Functional Software, Inc. (Sentry): error monitoring.
  • Google and Apple: only if you choose to sign in with them.

7. International transfers

Your core data is hosted in the UK. Some of our providers (including Vercel, Google, Resend, Stripe, Cloudflare and Sentry) may process personal data in the United States or other countries outside the UK. When that happens, we rely on UK adequacy regulations (including the UK Extension to the EU-US Data Privacy Framework where the provider is certified), or on the UK International Data Transfer Agreement or the UK Addendum to the EU Standard Contractual Clauses, so that your data stays protected.

8. How long we keep it

- Your organisation's data is kept while your organisation is active. If an organisation stays read-only (because the trial ended without a plan, the subscription ended or a payment wasn't made) for 12 months, we warn the owner by email at least 30 days in advance and then delete the organisation and all its data, including uploaded files and HMRC and bank connections.
- Items you delete in the app, such as an invoice or expense, are kept as deleted records within your organisation for audit purposes, and removed when the organisation is deleted.
- Your account is kept until you delete it from Settings → Security (or ask us to). It's deleted straight away, apart from the activity log and the record of the Terms you accepted, both described below. Every organisation where you were the only member is disconnected from HMRC and your bank straight away, kept for 30 days in case the deletion was a mistake (our support team can restore it during that time), then permanently deleted.
- Finble conversations are kept until you or an owner or admin deletes them, or the organisation is deleted.
- Support conversations (the details and message you send, our replies, and the IP address and browser information sent with the form) are kept so we can help with follow-ups, until you ask us to delete them or you delete your account. When you delete your account, your name, email address, phone number, IP address and browser information are removed from them; the messages themselves stay.
- Emails sent through BusyBee Hub, such as the invoices, estimates and reminders you send to your customers and the notices we send you, lose their content as soon as they're sent, and their recipient address and subject are deleted 90 days after they're created. An email we decided not to send, such as a notice about a support reply you'd already read in BusyBee Hub, is deleted, with its content, 90 days after it's created. An email that couldn't be sent is kept, with its content, until it's sent on a retry or your organisation is permanently deleted; for one that isn't tied to an organisation, such as the link to a data export, until you ask us to delete it.
- Bank connections stop updating when your 90-day consent expires or you disconnect; we delete the access tokens when you disconnect.
- The activity log keeps most entries for 30 days. Actions by our staff, two-factor security events such as using a
recovery code, and activity on your Making Tax Digital and VAT filings and your HMRC connection are kept for 12 months,
so we can investigate a problem or a complaint after the fact.
- The record of the Terms you accepted (your account ID, email address, the version, when and how you accepted it, but no IP address) is kept for 6 years after you delete your account, so we can deal with any legal claim, and is then deleted. What we recorded about Privacy Policy updates you were shown is deleted with your account.
- Payment event records from Stripe are kept for 90 days. Stripe keeps its own records of payments as required by law.
- Records used to limit requests are deleted by a daily clean-up once they're older than a set time: IP addresses used for the contact form after 24 hours; IP addresses and account or organisation identifiers used for public pages, such as an invoice you've been sent, and to limit exports, PDF downloads and receipt or statement reading, after 48 hours; and the recipient addresses we log to limit how many documents an organisation can send after 7 days.
- The device identifier for HMRC stays in your browser until you clear your browser storage.
- Data exports you request are deleted 7 days after they're created.
- Backups: deleted data may remain in encrypted backups for a short period until they're overwritten.

Remember that you may need to keep your business records for years for HMRC. Download what you need before you close your account or let an organisation become read-only for 12 months.

9. Security

  • everything you send to BusyBee Hub travels over encrypted connections (TLS), and data is encrypted at rest in our database
  • HMRC and bank access tokens are stored encrypted in a secrets vault
  • each organisation's data is separated at database level, so only its members can access it
  • two-factor authentication is available for every account and required for our staff
  • passwords must be at least 12 characters, and repeated sign-in attempts are limited
  • we never see your online banking login details or your card details

No system is completely secure. If a breach affects your personal data in a way that puts you at high risk, we'll tell you without undue delay.

10. Payments

Subscription payments are processed by Stripe. When you subscribe, your card details are entered on a page hosted by Stripe and are never stored or seen by BusyBee Hub; of your card we keep only the brand and last four digits, so you can recognise it. We also keep your plan, subscription status and billing dates, and Stripe's reference numbers for your account and subscription. We share your email address and your organisation's name with Stripe to set up your subscription, and Stripe may collect your billing address at checkout. The notifications Stripe sends us about your subscription and payments, which can include invoice details, are kept for 90 days (section 8). Stripe's own privacy policy is at stripe.com/gb/privacy.

If you connect a Stripe account to take payments from your customers, that account is yours: Stripe is the payment processor and Stripe's privacy policy applies to your customers' card details, which are entered on a page hosted by Stripe and never reach BusyBee Hub. We share your email address and business name with Stripe to create the account, and the invoice number and your customer's email address when they pay. We keep the payment reference, amount, fees, refund and dispute status, Stripe's deadline to respond to a dispute and, where Stripe provides it, the customer's email address, so that we can update your invoices and books.

11. Finble and AI processing

When you use Finble, the question you type, the recent messages in that conversation and a summary of your organisation's figures (balances, amounts owed, tax estimates, VAT and cash-flow figures, document numbers, and the names of your business, bank accounts, categories, customers, suppliers and properties) are sent to Vercel, Inc.'s AI Gateway and on to the model provider (currently Google) to generate the answer. We never send tax identifiers, bank account numbers, email addresses or free-text notes to Finble, and we send no addresses other than whatever name you've given a property. Conversations are stored in your account so you can read and delete them; message counts and token usage are recorded to manage costs.

When you upload a receipt, bank statement or CIS statement for us to read, the whole file is sent the same way, together with the context needed to read it (your expense categories, the bank account name, or your contractors' names and employer references). The file is sent as it is, so anything printed on it is included.

12. Your rights

Under UK data protection law you have the right to:

  • access the personal data we hold about you
  • have inaccurate data corrected
  • have your data deleted
  • restrict or object to how we use it
  • receive your data in a portable format
  • withdraw consent, where we rely on it

Deleting your data doesn't apply to records we need in order to deal with legal claims, such as the record of the Terms you accepted (your account ID, email address, the version, when and how you accepted it, but no IP address), which we keep for 6 years after you close your account (section 8).

You can download a copy of your data yourself from Settings → Security ("Send me my data": a ZIP of CSV or PDF files, emailed to you as a download link that works for 7 days, including all the data of any organisation where you're the only member), and delete your account there too. You can also download your reports and accountant pack at any time. To use any of these rights another way, email support@busybeehub.co.uk or use our contact form with the topic "Data & privacy". We'll reply within one month. If your request is about data a BusyBee Hub customer holds about you (for example, as their customer or tenant), please contact that business first; we'll help them respond.

If you're unhappy with how we've handled your data, you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk or on 0303 123 1113. We'd appreciate the chance to put things right first.

13. Children

BusyBee Hub is for adults running a business and isn't intended for anyone under 18.

14. Cookies

We use the cookies and browser storage BusyBee Hub needs to work, and Vercel Web Analytics only if you allow it. See our Cookie Policy.

15. Changes to this policy

We'll update this policy when the way we handle personal data changes. If a change significantly affects you, we'll tell you by email or in BusyBee Hub before it takes effect. Each new version shows a notice in BusyBee Hub until you dismiss it; when you do, we record which version you were shown. The date at the top of this page shows when it was last updated.

Version 2026-10-07

iOS and Android apps: coming soon