Terms of service

Version 1.2 · Effective date: 21 October 2026 (version 1.1 of 19 October 2026 is archived)

For accounts opened before the effective date, this version applies from the date given in our notice email (at least 30 days after we sent it).

1. Who we are

A1 Books ("A1 Books", "we", "us"). The legal entity that provides the service will be named here once its registration is complete. Contact: [email protected]. Once registered, its details are set out in the Country annex at the end of these terms. Until then, we do not issue invoices or take payments.

2. What these terms cover

These terms apply to this website, to the A1 Books software and to our bookkeeping services. "You" means the business that signs up or asks for a quote, and the people it allows to use its account.

For bookkeeping clients we also confirm your plan, fee and scope in writing, in an engagement letter or order form. If that document and these terms differ, that document wins — except for sections 13, 14, 15, 16 and 18 and the Country annex, which always apply. Only a document signed by both of us can change the governing law or the courts named in the Country annex.

Features we describe as planned or coming soon are not part of your service until we make them available.

3. Business customers only

Our services are for businesses and professionals, not consumers. When you sign up you confirm, by ticking the box at sign-up (it is never ticked in advance), that you are acting for a business, are authorised to accept these terms for it, and accept these terms and our data processing agreement. We record who accepted, when, and which version of these terms. We may refuse or end any account opened for personal use. Asking for a demo or a quote does not create an agreement; these terms apply once you sign up or start a trial.

4. What we do, and what we do not do

• We provide bookkeeping services and accounting software. Any work outside your chosen plan is quoted separately.
• We are not a licensed public accounting firm. We do not provide audit, review, assurance or attestation services, and our reports are not audited or certified.
• Except as set out in sections 4.1–4.3, we do not sign or file tax returns or act as your agent before any tax authority.
• We do not give tax, legal or investment advice. CFO-level meetings are general guidance, and all decisions remain yours.
• We never initiate, approve or authorise payments from your bank accounts, and we never hold your money. Where we have access to a bank feed, it is read-only.
• Everything we produce is based on the records and information you give us.
• Parts of the software categorise or suggest entries automatically. You remain responsible for reviewing and approving your books.

4.1 Coordinated tax filing

We do not give tax advice, and we do not sign or file tax returns or act as your agent before any tax authority. If you order our filing service, we prepare year-end figures from the books we keep and engage an independent, qualified tax professional (the "Tax Partner"), who makes any tax adjustments and prepares, signs and files the return in its own professional capacity. We manage the documents, timetable and fee with you.

4.2 Your part

You must give us complete and accurate records by the date in our filing timetable, approve the return in writing before it is filed, sign any authority the tax office or the Tax Partner needs, and pay any tax due. If you are late, the filing date may move. Tax, penalties and interest remain yours, and we are not responsible for any caused by late, incomplete or inaccurate information, your decisions, or late approval or payment.

4.3 Our responsibility

We prepare our figures with reasonable care. We are not responsible for the Tax Partner's advice, the content of the return or its filing, or any tax authority's decision. Our total liability for each return, including the Tax Partner's work, is the greater of three times that return's fee and USD 2,500 (£2,000), within section 15. You authorise us to share your records with the Tax Partner for this purpose. Section 4.3, not section 9 or section 15, governs our responsibility for the Tax Partner.

5. Your responsibilities

• Send complete, accurate and lawful records on time, and answer our questions promptly. Our work relies on what you give us; we do not audit or verify every document.
• Review the reports and figures we send, and tell us about any error as soon as you notice it.
• Meet your own filing and payment deadlines. Late or incomplete information can mean late filings.
• Keep your original records for as long as the law requires.
• Give account access only to people you authorise, keep login details secure, and tell us at once if you think an account has been misused. You are responsible for what your users do in your account.
• Have the right to share any personal data you send us, and tell the people concerned how it is used.
• Keep your payment details current.

6. Fees and billing

• Fees, plan limits, user allowances and any charges for usage above those limits are as shown on our pricing page or in your order form. Prices are per company. Each company you keep books for needs its own plan, including where you are an accountant or bookkeeper acting for clients.
• Prices exclude taxes, which are added where they apply.
• Monthly plans are billed in advance and renew each month. Yearly plans are paid in advance and renew each year; we email you a reminder at least 30 days before renewal. A billing month runs from the day of the month on which your subscription started.
• By subscribing you authorise us, and our payment provider, to charge your chosen payment method for each renewal and for any usage charges, until you cancel.
• If a payment fails we may retry it and will ask you to update your details. A payment that has failed is treated as an overdue invoice under section 8.
• You may cancel at any time by email to [email protected]. There is no cancellation fee. A monthly plan ends at the end of the billing month in which you cancel. A yearly plan stops renewing and ends at the end of the year you have paid for.
• We do not refund part of a month, or unused months of a yearly plan, except where the law requires it or where section 17 provides for it. A yearly plan is priced below the monthly rate in exchange for the full year, and that discount does not carry over if the plan ends early at your request.
• CFO-level meeting hours included in a plan are "up to" the number stated, are booked ahead, and lapse at the end of each billing month. Unused hours are not carried over or refunded.
• We may change our prices on at least 30 days' notice by email. A new price applies to a monthly plan from the next billing month, and to a yearly plan from its next renewal.

7. Free trial

Software-only plans include one free trial per company, lasting 30 days. No card is needed, and the trial does not become a paid plan automatically. We may refuse or end a trial we believe is being misused.

8. Late payment and suspension

This section governs non-payment; section 17 governs other serious breaches.

If an invoice or a card payment is overdue we will send a reminder. If it remains unpaid, we may pause our work and limit your account to read-only access, after giving you at least 7 days' notice by email. We restore the service once the overdue amount is paid. We do not charge interest on overdue amounts, but we may recover reasonable costs of collection. We may suspend access immediately where needed to protect the platform or other clients.

9. Subcontractors

We may use staff, contractors and partners to deliver the service, including technology providers that host the platform. We remain responsible to you for work we subcontract, subject to section 15, and they are bound by confidentiality. Where you contract directly with a partner, that partner's own terms apply to that relationship and we are not responsible for it. Providers that handle personal data are listed in our data processing agreement.

10. Your data

• You own your books, documents and data. We use them only to provide and support the service and to meet our legal obligations.
• We never sell your data.
• You can export your full ledger and reports at any time, subject to sections 8 and 13.
• When you leave with your account paid up, you keep read-only access for 90 days and we give you a full export. After that we delete your data within 30 days, and remove it from backups within a further 35 days, except what the law requires us to keep, and the client checks described in our privacy notice.
• Where we handle personal data in your books on your behalf, we do so under our data processing agreement, which forms part of this agreement. We will not make changes to it that reduce your protection without your agreement.

11. Security

We protect your data with measures appropriate to the risk, including encryption in transit and at rest, access control limited to staff who need it, and regular backups. If a security incident affects your data, we will tell you without undue delay, explain what happened, and tell you what we are doing about it. You can ask us at any time for a current summary of our security measures.

12. Confidentiality

Each of us keeps the other's non-public business information confidential, uses it only for our work together, and shares it only with people who need it and are bound by similar duties. This does not apply to information that is already public, or that the law, a court or a regulator requires us to disclose. On request at the end of the agreement, each of us will return or delete the other's confidential information, subject to section 10 and to any legal retention duty. These duties continue after the agreement ends.

13. Acceptable use and client checks

You must not use A1 Books to break any law, including tax, sanctions and anti-money-laundering rules; to store unlawful content; to attack, overload or reverse-engineer the platform; to access other clients' data; or to resell the service without our written agreement.

We may ask for information and documents to confirm who you are and who owns and controls your business, and we may decline, suspend or end a service where we cannot obtain them, or where providing the service would breach sanctions or other law. Where we must suspend or end a service for this reason, sections 6 and 10 apply only so far as the law allows.

While this agreement is in force and for 12 months afterwards, neither of us will solicit the other's staff or contractors who worked on the service. General advertising is not solicitation.

14. Availability and support

We work to keep the platform available and secure, but we do not guarantee it will be uninterrupted or error-free. We may carry out maintenance and change features over time. Support is by email at [email protected], and we aim to reply within one working day. We do not offer a guaranteed response time or uptime level unless your order form says otherwise.

15. Warranties and liability

We will provide the service with reasonable care and skill.

• Each party's total liability for all claims under or in connection with this agreement, taken together in aggregate, is limited to the greater of US$5,000 (£4,000 where the United Kingdom annex applies) and the fees paid or payable in the 12 months before the first event giving rise to a claim.
• Neither party is liable for loss of profit, revenue or goodwill, for indirect or consequential loss, or for lost data you could have recovered from your own records.
• We are not liable for loss, penalties or interest caused by records or information that were incomplete, inaccurate or late, by your own filings, or by partners you contract with directly.
• Our reports and figures are unaudited management information prepared for you alone. If you share them with a lender, investor or anyone else, they are shared for information only; no other person may rely on them, and we accept no responsibility to anyone else who sees or uses them.
• Nothing in these terms limits or excludes any liability that cannot be limited or excluded by law. The Country annex sets out what that means where you are.
• Your obligation to pay fees due, and your indemnity under section 16, are not subject to the limits in this section.

16. Your indemnity

You will indemnify us against claims, losses and reasonable costs arising from your use of the service in breach of these terms, from content or data you put into the service that is unlawful or infringes someone's rights, or from your failure to have the right to share personal data you send us.

We will tell you promptly about any such claim and give you the information you reasonably need. We keep control of our own defence and may settle a claim as we see fit, acting reasonably. You may take part in the defence at your own cost.

17. Ending the agreement

Either of us may end this agreement for any reason on 30 days' written notice. If we end it this way, we refund the unused part of any fee you have paid in advance. If you end it this way, section 6 applies. Unused CFO-level meeting hours lapse as set out in section 6 and are not refunded.

Either of us may end it immediately if the other seriously breaches these terms and does not fix the breach within 14 days of written notice. Non-payment is dealt with under section 8. We may also end or suspend the service immediately where section 13 permits it.

Sections 4.3, 8, 10, 11, 12, 13, 15, 16, 18 and 20, and the Country annex, continue after the agreement ends. Fees already due remain payable.

18. Our intellectual property

The A1 Books software, website content and design belong to us or our licensors. During your free trial or subscription we grant you a non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable licence to use the software for your own internal business purposes. You may not copy, modify, rent, sell or sublicense it, or use it to build a competing product, except to the extent that the law does not allow us to restrict you. We keep our methods and templates. Figures shown in demos and sample files are not real client data. If you send us feedback or suggestions, we may use them freely and without obligation to you. Third-party names are the trademarks of their owners and we are not affiliated with them.

19. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. We tell existing clients about material changes by email at least 30 days before they apply, and we keep earlier versions available on request. If you do not agree, you may cancel before the change takes effect. If you cancel for this reason, we refund the unused part of any fee you have paid in advance. Changes do not affect fees already agreed in writing for the current billing period, and do not reduce the protection given by our data processing agreement without your agreement.

20. General

Neither of us is liable for delays caused by events outside our reasonable control. You may not transfer this agreement without our consent; we may transfer it to a company that takes over our business, and we will tell you. Notices to us go to [email protected], and notices to you go to the email address on your account. Nothing in these terms makes either of us the other's agent, partner or employee. These terms, together with our pricing page, your order form or engagement letter, our data processing agreement and our privacy notice, are the whole agreement between us. If any part is found invalid, the rest still applies.