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Privacy policy
This policy explains what personal data CERTANTA LIMITED (BRN 81129170, “Certanta”, “we”) collects, why, who we share it with and what you can ask us to do with it. It covers certanta.com, the Certanta client portal at app.certanta.com, and the ways you can send us documents and messages: email, WhatsApp and Telegram.
We are a Hong Kong company and handle personal data under the Personal Data (Privacy) Ordinance (Cap. 486). If you are elsewhere, you may have further rights under your own law; write to us and we will help.
What we collect
- Contact details — your name, email address, phone number and company, when you contact us, book a call, sign up or become a client.
- Client and identity information — the details we need to take on a company as a client, such as its directors, shareholders and their identity documents.
- Your books — the documents and records we keep your accounts from: receipts, invoices, bank statements, payroll reports and similar papers, and the entries we make from them. These can contain personal data about you and about the people your company deals with.
- Messages — emails, and messages you send us on WhatsApp or Telegram, including photos and files, your phone number or Telegram account, and the profile name the app shows us.
- Portal use — sign-in records and a log of actions in the portal (for example, which documents were uploaded or viewed), kept for security and to show who did what in your books.
- Website — what you type into the forms on certanta.com, and the technical information any web server receives (IP address, browser type). certanta.com does not use advertising or tracking cookies; the portal uses a cookie to keep you signed in.
Why we use it
- To provide the services you ask for: bookkeeping, management accounts, tax returns, audit support and related work.
- To file the receipts and documents you send us into your books, and to answer your questions.
- To meet our legal and professional obligations, including keeping accounting records and checking who our clients are.
- To keep the portal and our systems secure and to investigate misuse.
- To tell you about our own services, only if you have agreed. You can stop this at any time.
We do not sell personal data, and we do not use your books or messages for advertising.
Receipts and messages by WhatsApp and Telegram
If you connect WhatsApp or Telegram from Accounts in your portal, photos and PDFs you send us go straight into your company’s books as drafts, which our team checks before anything is posted. Questions you send us there reach our team, who reply in the same chat.
- Messages to our WhatsApp business number are handled through Meta’s WhatsApp Business Platform, so Meta processes them on our behalf. Telegram chats are not end-to-end encrypted.
- We keep a record of these chats, as we do of emails, so we can show what was sent and when.
- Please don’t send passports, contracts or other sensitive documents by chat; upload them in the portal instead.
- You can disconnect at any time by sending DISCONNECT on WhatsApp, /disconnect on Telegram, or from Accounts in your portal.
Who we share it with
Only with people and services that help us do the work, under confidentiality and data-protection terms, and only as far as they need:
- Service providers that host and run our systems and communications, for example Cloudflare (website, portal and security), our email provider, Meta (WhatsApp) and Telegram (messaging), and AI providers that read documents for us, such as Anthropic. We use AI providers on business terms that do not allow them to train their models on your data.
- Our group and partner firms where you ask us to work with them, for example your company secretary or auditor.
- Authorities such as the Inland Revenue Department, when filing on your behalf or when the law requires it.
Some of these providers keep data outside Hong Kong. Where they do, we choose providers with recognised security standards and contractual protections for the data.
How long we keep it
We keep accounting records and the documents behind them for at least seven years, as Hong Kong law requires for a company’s records, and longer where a client asks us to or a law requires it. Other personal data is kept while we have a reason to, then deleted or anonymised.
Security
Data travels encrypted, access to client books is limited to the people working on them, and sign-ins and changes in the portal are logged. No system is perfectly secure; if something goes wrong that affects your data, we will tell you.
Your rights
You can ask us for a copy of the personal data we hold about you, ask us to correct it, or ask us to stop using it for marketing. Write to help@certanta.com. We will reply within 40 days, as the Ordinance requires, and may charge a reasonable fee for copies where the law allows.
Contact
CERTANTA LIMITED, 16F, King’s Commercial Centre, 25 King’s Road, Tin Hau, Hong Kong · help@certanta.com
We may update this policy as our services change; the date at the top shows the latest version.