Terms of service

These terms are the agreement between your firm and Neperian Inc. for the use of Firmdesk. By creating a workspace, you accept them for your firm.

1. The service

Firmdesk is software for accounting, bookkeeping and tax firms: clients and contacts, engagements and their deadlines, tasks, time, invoices, and a portal where a firm and its clients exchange documents and requests. We may improve it, add to it and change how it looks. We won't remove something firms rely on without telling them at least 30 days ahead.

2. Accounts

• Whoever creates a workspace is its owner and accepts these terms for the firm. They must be allowed to.
• Each person signs in with their own login. Logins aren't shared.
• You are responsible for who you give access to: your team, and your clients' contacts.
• Keep passwords and recovery codes safe, and tell us at admin@firmdesk.ca if you think an account was used by someone else.

3. Your data

Everything your firm and its clients put in Firmdesk belongs to your firm, or to your clients. You give us permission to keep it and process it only as needed to provide the service to you. We claim no rights over it.

You are responsible for having the right to put it there: for your clients' information, that means your engagement with them and the privacy laws that apply to your firm. The privacy policy says how we handle it.

You can export everything, or one client's data, from Settings, Data, at any time and at no charge.

4. Deadlines are a tool, not advice

Firmdesk works out filing and payment deadlines from the settings you give each engagement and from the rules of the Canada Revenue Agency and Revenu Québec as we understand them. Rules change, and a client's situation can differ from its settings. Your firm remains responsible for the deadlines it meets, the returns it files and the advice it gives. Firmdesk doesn't give tax, accounting or legal advice, and doesn't file anything with any authority.

If you see a deadline that looks wrong, tell us at admin@firmdesk.ca. We treat those reports as urgent.

5. Acceptable use

You agree not to:

• use Firmdesk for anything unlawful, or to keep information you have no right to keep;
• try to get into another firm's workspace, or test the service's security without our written agreement;
• upload programs, malware, or files meant to harm someone's computer;
• send unsolicited bulk email through the portal;
• resell the service, or copy it to build a competing one;
• overload the service on purpose.

We may suspend an account that does any of these. Unless the harm is urgent, we write to the firm's owners first.

6. Fees

• Plans are billed monthly or yearly, as you choose, in Canadian dollars, in advance; a year costs ten months. GST or HST is added for your firm's province.
• A trial is free for 30 days and needs no card. Nothing is charged until you choose a plan. When a trial ends without one, the workspace becomes read-only.
• Each plan allows a number of people on your team. Adding someone past it asks for a bigger plan.
• If a price changes, you are told at least 30 days before it applies to you.
• If a payment fails, we tell you and try again. 7 days after it failed, the workspace becomes read-only until it is paid; after 21 days it's locked, except for paying and exporting your data.

7. Refunds

If you cancel a yearly plan within 30 days of paying for it, we refund that payment in full, no questions asked. Otherwise a plan you cancel runs to the end of the period you paid for, and that period isn't refunded: the free trial is there to try Firmdesk first. If the service was unavailable for more than 24 hours in a month because of us, ask and we credit that month.

8. Cancelling, and what happens to your data

You can cancel at any time, from Settings, Plan and billing; you can also pause your plan instead. An owner can also ask for the workspace to be deleted, from Settings, Data.

• A plan you cancel keeps working to the end of the period you paid for. After it ends, or after a trial ends without a plan, the workspace is read-only and you can still export everything, for 90 days. Choose a plan in that time and it all works again. We email the owners two weeks before the end.
• If an owner asks for the workspace to be deleted, your data stays where it is for 30 days, and you can still export it. An owner can change their mind during that time.
• Then the workspace is deleted: its records, its documents, and the logins that belong to no other firm. Backups lose it within 30 days after that.

We may end the agreement with 30 days' notice, or at once if these terms are seriously broken. In either case you get the same 30 days to export your data.

9. Availability and support

We work to keep Firmdesk available at all times, and we say so publicly when it isn't: status.firmdesk.ca. Maintenance that needs the service to stop is announced ahead and done outside business hours. We answer support requests sent to admin@firmdesk.ca within one business day.

10. Confidentiality

We treat everything in your workspace as confidential. Our staff look at a firm's data only to keep the service running, when the firm asks for help, or to import the files it sends us for its move, and as little as the task needs.

11. What we don't promise

We provide Firmdesk with care, and we fix what breaks. Beyond what these terms say, the service is provided as it is: we don't promise that it will never be interrupted or free of errors, or that it fits a particular purpose. Nothing here takes away rights the law gives you that can't be waived.

12. Limit of liability

To the extent the law allows, neither of us is liable to the other for indirect losses: lost profits, lost business, penalties or interest charged by a tax authority. Our total liability to your firm for anything arising from the service is limited to the fees your firm paid in the 12 months before the claim.

This limit doesn't apply to harm we cause on purpose or through gross negligence, or to anything the law doesn't allow us to limit.

13. The law that applies

These terms are governed by the laws of Ontario and the laws of Canada that apply there. Disputes go to the courts of Ontario, unless the law where your firm is gives you the right to another court.

14. Changes to these terms

When these terms change in a way that matters, the owners of every workspace are told by email at least 30 days before the change takes effect. If you don't agree, you can cancel before then and export your data.

15. Contact

Neperian Inc.. admin@firmdesk.ca