Privacy Policy

This Privacy Policy explains how Ogal LLC, a Wyoming limited liability company ("CheckBooks.ai", "we", "us"), collects, uses, and protects information when you use checkbooks.ai (the "Service").

1. Information We Collect

• Account information — your name, email address, password (stored only as a salted hash), and optional passkey credentials. If you turn on text-message sign-in codes, your phone number (stored encrypted).
• Bank account details — routing and account numbers for the accounts you connect. Account numbers are encrypted at rest. For a business, its employer identification number (EIN), also encrypted.
• Check and business data — the checks you create (payee, amount, date, memo, signature image), mailing addresses, your contacts, invoices, and business profile.
• Photos you scan or upload — pictures of checks and invoices. These can show bank routing and account numbers, signatures, names and addresses.
• Assistant conversations — the messages you exchange with the CheckBooks.ai assistant, kept as your chat history.
• Verification data — your attestation that you own an account, the record of Plaid's confirmation when you verify an account through Plaid (section 3), and verification events on checks you issue.
• Usage and security data — IP address, device and browser information, and audit logs of security-relevant actions (sign-ins, check views, endorsements). We use these to protect accounts and to meet our fraud-prevention obligations.

2. How We Use Information

We use this information to:

• provide the Service — creating, delivering, and tracking your checks;
• let recipients verify a check's authenticity and see the issuer's account-verification tier;
• run the AI features you use (section 4): reading a scanned check or invoice, suggesting a category, and answering you in the assistant;
• secure accounts, prevent fraud, and investigate abuse;
• send transactional email and text messages (check deliveries, receipts, password resets, sign-in codes);
• comply with legal obligations and respond to lawful requests.

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not use your check data for advertising.

3. How Information Is Shared

We share information only as needed to operate the Service:

• Check recipients — a person you send a check to sees the check itself (your name, account's bank name, amount, memo, signature) and, on the verification page, the check's authenticity status and issuer verification tier.
• Service providers — infrastructure hosting (Railway); transactional email (SendGrid); text-message sign-in codes (Twilio), which carries your phone number and the code; Cloudflare for DNS, content delivery, its Turnstile bot check on our sign-up, sign-in, sign-in-code, password-reset and check-verification forms and the question box on our home page, and page analytics (section 5); file storage for check and invoice images, signatures and rendered check documents (Cloudflare R2 / AWS S3); and the KeyHalve verification rail, which receives only the cryptographic seal metadata needed to verify a check — not your bank account numbers.
• Mailing a check (Lob) — if you mail checks through CheckBooks.ai with Sign & Mail, where it is available, Lob prints and mails them. When you set up a checkbook for mailing, its routing and account numbers and the signer's name go to Lob, which confirms the account with small test deposits you report back. For each check you mail, Lob receives the payee's name and mailing address, your return name and address, the amount, check number and memo, and a payment-advice page printed with the check.
• Payments for a plan (Stripe) — Stripe processes a paid plan's payments. Your card details go to Stripe and never to CheckBooks.ai; we receive the plan and the subscription's status.
• Accounting software (QuickBooks, Xero) — only if you connect QuickBooks (Intuit) or Xero: we read your unpaid bills so you can pay them by check, and record a payment there when a check pays one of those bills.
• AI providers (OpenAI, Google) — for the AI features described in section 4.
• Anthropic (Claude) — CheckBooks.ai's support seat runs on Anthropic's Claude and reads the questions you type into Ask me, to answer them (section 4).
• Google — if you use Sign in with Google, Google confirms your identity to us. Our pages also load fonts from Google Fonts, which receives your IP address and browser information.
• Your own AI assistant ("Connect your AI") — only if you connect one and approve it on the approval page. Within what you approve, it can read your checks, contacts and invoices, prepare checks for you to sign, and send checks you have already signed. If you give it the role that writes, signs and sends checks for you, it signs those checks with your default signature, within the per-check and per-day limits you set, and you get an email for each one. Without that role it never signs. What it reads is handled by that AI's provider under your agreement with them. You can pause or disconnect it at any time in Settings → Connect your AI.
• Legal — when required by law, subpoena, or to protect the rights, safety, or property of CheckBooks.ai, our users, or the public, including reporting suspected check fraud to financial institutions and law enforcement.
• Business transfers — as part of a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets, subject to this policy.

Bank account verification (Plaid)

When you verify a bank account through Plaid, we use Plaid Inc. to confirm that you own the account your checks are drawn on. Plaid securely collects your banking credentials directly — your bank login credentials are never seen, handled, or stored by CheckBooks.ai. From Plaid we receive the account and routing numbers, the bank's name and the account type of the accounts you link, which we need to confirm the account and to render your checks correctly. To list your other accounts at the same bank, we read their numbers to show them and keep only the ones you tick. Where your bank shares it, Plaid also sends us its record of the account's owners — names, and often addresses, emails and phone numbers; we read only the names, to check that one of them is yours, and we keep whether it matched, when, and which of your names matched. We do not keep or log the rest of that record.

We use this information solely to verify account ownership and to issue your checks. We do not use Plaid to move money, initiate transfers, or originate ACH payments. Plaid's handling of your data is governed by Plaid's own privacy policy, available at https://plaid.com/legal/#end-user-privacy-policy.

4. AI Features

Some features use an AI model run by an outside provider: OpenAI, our primary provider, and Google (Gemini) when OpenAI cannot answer. When you use one of these features, we send the provider:

• photos of checks you scan (checks you wrote or received) and of invoices you upload or scan, to read their fields;
• on the public check-verification page, the check photo the visitor uploads;
• a payee's name, when the app suggests a spending category;
• your messages to the CheckBooks.ai assistant, your recent conversation with it, and the check details it looks up to answer you (payee, amount, check number, date, status, category and memo).

These photos can show bank routing and account numbers, signatures, names and addresses. The provider returns the fields it read or an answer, which we show you to review; nothing it returns is signed or sent without you. We never send your password, passkeys or sign-in codes. Each provider handles what it receives under its own terms.

AI features are off until you turn them on. Before anything is sent, CheckBooks.ai shows you what is sent, to whom and why, and asks. You can turn them off at any time in Settings → Personal → AI features; after that nothing more is sent. If you leave them off, you enter a check's or an invoice's details yourself. On the public check-verification page, which has no account, the photo is sent only when the visitor ticks the box that asks, each time.

While AI features are off, CheckBooks.ai sends nothing you upload to an AI provider; a question you type into Ask me is read by our support seat, which runs on Anthropic's Claude, and by the people at CheckBooks.ai; a photo you tick on the Verify page and an AI app you connected yourself stay separate.

Ask me. A question you type into Ask me is answered by CheckBooks.ai's support seat, which runs on Anthropic's Claude, or by a person at CheckBooks.ai. With your question, Ask me sends the seat when you asked, the page you asked from, which business you asked for (if any), your first name and your account's setup: whether your email is confirmed, a bank account verified, a signature added and a passkey added. It adds no email address, bank number or check of yours. The AI features switch does not cover Ask me; to ask a person instead, write to [email protected].

Asking without an account. If you ask from our home page without signing in, we keep your question and our answer for 30 days, linked only to a random key saved in your browser, not to your name or email. Our support seat or a person at CheckBooks.ai reads it to answer.

Voice input in the assistant uses your browser's speech service, which in Chrome is Google's. The microphone shows only while AI features are on, and what you dictate goes into the message box for you to send.

5. Cookies and Analytics

CheckBooks.ai sets a session cookie to keep you signed in, and short-lived security cookies while you connect QuickBooks, Xero or your own AI assistant. We do not use advertising cookies.

Our pages permit Cloudflare's Web Analytics script, which measures page views and page performance when Cloudflare adds it at its edge; we are confirming whether it is switched on. When Umami is switched on, it measures the same. We do not use them for advertising. Cloudflare Turnstile and Sign in with Google run Cloudflare's and Google's own code, which may set their own cookies under their own privacy policies.

6. Security

The connection between your device and CheckBooks.ai is encrypted (TLS); the providers named in section 3 secure their own connections under their own terms. Sensitive fields, including bank account numbers and verification secrets, are encrypted at rest. Accounts are protected by password authentication as well as passkey / WebAuthn sign-in — you can register a passkey and sign in with your fingerprint, face, PIN, or a hardware security key — plus rate limiting and audit logging. No system is perfectly secure; notify us immediately at [email protected] if you believe your account has been compromised.

7. Data Retention

We keep your account's data while your account is open. When you delete your account, we delete or clear the rest and keep only what a check you issued still needs, and the records of what was done: a check is a legal instrument, and the person you paid may still verify or deposit it. Our account deletion page lists what is deleted and what is kept, with the reason for each. Kept records are kept for 7 years after the account is deleted.

A photo a visitor uploads on the public check-verification page is stored as a record of that verification attempt and sent to the AI provider as section 4 describes; we keep it until it is no longer needed to answer the check. No automatic deletion rule applies to it today.

8. Your Rights

You may see and update your account information in Settings, and you can delete your account yourself: Settings → Security → Delete your account. If you cannot sign in, or you want a copy of your data, write to [email protected] (to delete, with the subject "Delete my CheckBooks.ai account"); a person answers within 2 business days. A deletion keeps only what Section 7 describes. Depending on where you live, you may have additional rights under laws such as the CCPA or GDPR; we honor verified requests under those laws.

9. Children

The Service is not directed to anyone under 18, and we do not knowingly collect information from children. If you believe a child has provided us information, contact us and we will delete it.

10. International Users

The Service is operated from the United States, and information is processed and stored in the United States. By using the Service you consent to that processing.

11. The Android App

The CheckBooks.ai app for Android is this same website, checkbooks.ai, opened inside Google's Chrome on your phone (a Trusted Web Activity, or a Chrome Custom Tab where that is not available): the same account, the same data and the same policies as the site. Nothing is stored on the phone beyond what the browser itself keeps — its cookies, cache and saved sign-in material — and the download is governed by Google Play's own terms.

12. Changes to This Policy

We may update this policy from time to time. If a change is material, we will notify you (for example by email or an in-app notice) before it takes effect. The "Last updated" date above reflects the current version.

13. Contact

Ogal LLC · Wyoming, USA · [email protected] · Support