Legal
Privacy, cookies and terms.
Everything we do with your data and everything you agree to, on one page, in the same plain English as the rest of the site.
The short version
This page covers what Alder does with your data, what cookies we set, and the terms you agree to by using it. It is written to be read once, in full, in about four minutes.
- What we sell
- Bookkeeping software, on a monthly or yearly subscription.
- What we hold
- Your ledger, your contacts, and the account you sign in with.
- Where it sits
- Falkenstein, Germany. It does not leave the EU.
- What we never do
- Sell it, train models on it, or hand it to a marketer.
What we hold
Three things. Your ledger — transactions, invoices, contacts and attachments, either imported by you or pulled from a bank feed you connected. Your account is a name, a work email and a hashed password. And a service log of sign-ins and errors, kept thirty days, which is how we find out something broke before you tell us.
Bank feeds are read-only. Alder cannot move money, and no credential you type at your bank is ever seen by us.
We keep your ledger readable for ninety days after you cancel, in case you come back or your accountant needs one last export. Then it is deleted, backups included, within a further thirty days.
Who else touches it
Five companies, listed below in full. Each one is under a data processing agreement, each one is inside the EU or the UK, and none of them may use your data for anything except the job named. We add to this list by updating this page, never quietly.
| Company | What it does | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Hetzner | Hosting and backups | Falkenstein, DE |
| Stripe Payments Europe | Card payments and invoicing | Dublin, IE |
| TrueLayer | Read-only open banking feeds | London, UK |
| Postmark | Transactional email | Frankfurt, DE |
| Plausible | Page counts, no cookies | Tallinn, EE |
Your rights
Under UK and EU data protection law you can ask for a copy of everything we hold, ask us to correct it, ask us to delete it, or object to us holding it at all. Most of that you can do yourself without asking: export lives in your account settings and produces CSV and JSON, at any time.
For anything else, write to hello@alder.co and we answer inside one working day, and act inside thirty. If we get it wrong you can complain to the ICO in the UK, or to your own supervisory authority in the EU.
Cookies and tracking
One cookie, and it is the session that keeps you signed in. There is no advertising cookie, no third-party pixel and no consent banner, because there is nothing to consent to. Page counts come from Plausible, which measures without storing anything on your machine.
The agreement
Alder is a subscription. The trial runs thirty days and asks for no card; if you do nothing at the end of it, the account goes quiet rather than charging you. Paid plans are monthly or yearly, prices exclude VAT, and yearly pays for ten months.
Cancel any month and it ends at the next renewal, with no notice period and no exit fee. We refund the first month for any reason if you ask. Upgrades are prorated to the day; downgrades take effect at renewal so nothing disappears mid-month.
Your books are yours. We do not claim a licence over them, we do not train anything on them, and we will not sell the company’s customer data as an asset. Alder Books Ltd is registered in England, number 14882031, VAT GB 412 7788 03, at Unit 4, Portwall Yard, Redcliffe, Bristol BS1 6NB.
If this page changes in a way that matters, we email every account at least thirty days before it takes effect and say plainly what moved.
Close your next month in an afternoon.
Thirty days, all of Studio, no card. Import last year while you are there — it takes about ten minutes and tells you more than this page can.
- Set-up time
- Under 10 minutes, on your own
- If you would rather ask
- hello@alder.co