Terms of Service

1. What PlainBooks Is

PlainBooks is general-ledger bookkeeping software for small businesses. We give you the books — chart of accounts, journal entries, accounting periods, the full report set (Trial Balance, Profit & Loss, Balance Sheet, GL Detail, AR aging, AP aging, 1099 summary, specialized journals), bank reconciliation, and a monthly PDF package your accountant can drop straight into a return. PlainBooks works for any small business; trucking workspaces additionally get IFTA quarterly fuel-tax tracking and cost-per-mile reporting.

How data gets into PlainBooks:

• You post journal entries. The journal-entry form is the primary path: pick the accounts, enter debits and credits, write a memo, post. Each entry is checked for double-entry balance before it's saved.
• Bills. Enter a bill and PlainBooks posts a balanced accrual entry; mark it paid and PlainBooks posts the payment entry. Both are atomic.
• Trucking workflows. If your workspace is configured for trucking, trips and state-mileage entries feed the IFTA report and cost-per-mile calculations automatically.
• Period close + reopen. Closing a period generates closing entries to Retained Earnings; reopening reverses them while preserving the audit trail.

You do not connect a bank account. PlainBooks does not ingest bank feeds, auto-categorize transactions, or forecast cash flow. If you want bank-fed cash visibility or cash-flow forecasting, that is a different category of tool.

PlainBooks is not a financial advisor, accountant, tax preparer, payroll processor, or lending service. We give you accurate books. Your accountant or tax preparer uses those books at year-end. You make your own financial decisions.

2. Your Account

• You must be 18 or older to use PlainBooks
• You must provide accurate information when signing up
• You are responsible for keeping your login credentials secure
• One account per person. Creating multiple trial accounts is not permitted

3. Free Trial

When signups open, new accounts will get a 14-day free trial. No credit card required. During the trial you have full access to PlainBooks — workspaces, the journal-entry surface, period close + reopen, bank reconciliation, the full report set, monthly PDF package, audit log. The same features stay available after the trial when you subscribe.

Signups are not yet open. Leave your email at plainbooks.app and we will tell you when launch happens.

At the end of the trial, your account is locked. Locked means:

• You cannot view your books, journal entries, or reports
• You can log in to export your data for free or subscribe to resume
• Your data is preserved for 30 days after locking
• You will receive email reminders at day 20 and day 28 before deletion
• After 30 days, your data is permanently deleted — we cannot recover it

4. Pricing and Payment

• $15/month or $150/year
• All features included at every price — no tiers, no upsells
• Payments processed by Stripe. We never see your card number
• Subscriptions renew automatically. We email you 5 days before every renewal with the exact amount and date — because we don't want your money if you're not getting value. If PlainBooks isn't useful to you, cancel before renewal and keep every penny. We would rather lose a subscriber than charge someone who isn't using the product

5. Cancellation and Refunds

Cancellation

• Cancel any time from Settings → Billing → Cancel. One click. No phone calls, no chat bots, no retention offers, no guilt
• You keep full access until the end of your current paid period — the time you already paid for is yours
• After your paid period ends, your account is locked (same rules as the trial lock described in Section 3)

After cancellation — what happens to your data

• Day 0: Account locked. You can still log in to export your data or resubscribe
• Day 20: We email you: "10 days until your data is deleted. Export now if you want to keep it."
• Day 28: We email you again: "2 days left. This is your final reminder."
• Day 30: All data stored in PlainBooks is permanently deleted — your workspaces, chart of accounts, journal entries, periods, customers, vendors, vehicles, trips, account settings, and audit log. We send a confirmation email. After this point, no one — not you, not us — can recover it

If you resubscribe before day 30, your account reactivates and everything is exactly as you left it.

Refunds

• 30-day money-back guarantee on your first payment — no questions asked, no hoops
• One refund per customer. If you've received a refund before, you are not eligible for another
• Refunds are processed within 24 hours and appear on your statement within 5-10 business days
• After a refund, your account is locked and the same 30-day data preservation timeline begins (with the same email reminders)

6. Your Data

See our Privacy Policy for the full details. Here is the summary:

• We never sell your data to anyone, for any reason
• We never show you ads
• We never send your financial data to third parties. Stripe processes your subscription payment directly — we never see or store your card number. We do not sync your books to any external system
• We never use your data to train external AI models (third-party LLMs or ML services)
• You can export all your data for free at any time — during your trial, during your subscription, and for 30 days after cancellation. Export is never locked behind a paywall
• You can delete your account and all data stored in PlainBooks at any time from Settings → Account → Delete Account. You must type "DELETE" to confirm. Deletion is permanent and completed within 24 hours. This cannot be undone

These are not marketing promises — they are how the system is built. There is no mechanism in PlainBooks to sell data or show ads because we never built one.

7. Third-Party Services We Use

PlainBooks uses a small number of third-party services for narrow operational purposes. None of them receive your books.

Payment Processing

Your subscription payments are processed by Stripe (stripe.com/legal). Stripe receives the information needed to bill you — your name, email, and card details, which you enter on Stripe's own form. We never see or store your full card number.

Email Delivery

We send transactional emails only — receipts, renewal reminders, deletion warnings, account-related notices, and notifications when you opt in. We never send marketing emails you did not ask for. Email is delivered via Resend (resend.com/legal).

Data Hosting

PlainBooks runs on Supabase (supabase.com/legal) and is fronted by Cloudflare (cloudflare.com/legal). Your books live in encrypted databases hosted in the United States.

Error Tracking

Application errors are reported to Sentry (sentry.io/legal) so we can fix bugs. Workspace IDs and error messages are sent; the contents of your journal entries, customer records, or financial reports are not.

If a third-party service goes down, parts of PlainBooks may be temporarily affected (you may not receive an email, or payments may not process for a brief window). We do not control these services and cannot guarantee their uptime.

8. Security

• All connections use HTTPS (TLS 1.2 or better) — your data is encrypted in transit
• Your data is encrypted at rest in our database (AES-256)
• Your password is hashed — we cannot read it, even if we wanted to
• Every account and workspace is isolated at the database level — you can only access your own data, enforced by the database itself (Postgres row-level security), not just our code
• You can sign out at any time. Sessions also expire automatically when you close your browser or after 30 minutes of inactivity
• We verify your email with a 6-digit code during signup
• Every meaningful action (posting a journal entry, closing a period, deleting a workspace) writes to an append-only audit log that cannot be modified or deleted

For the full technical breakdown, see our Privacy Policy.

9. What We Promise

• The price you see is the price you pay — no hidden fees, no surprise charges, no "premium tier" held back behind a higher price
• Cancellation is always one click — we will never make you call a phone number, talk to a chatbot, or click through a guilt trip
• Your data is always exportable — we will never hold your data hostage behind a paywall
• We will tell you what we can see, what we cannot see, and what we do with it — honestly, in words a human can read
• If you notice something wrong, email us — we will investigate and respond honestly. If it is our fault, we will make it right

10. Limitations

• PlainBooks records and reports your bookkeeping data — it does not tell you what to do with it. We are not financial advisors and nothing in PlainBooks should be taken as financial, legal, or tax advice
• The accuracy of your reports depends on the accuracy of the journal entries you post. PlainBooks enforces double-entry balance (debits must equal credits) and writes atomic transactions, but it cannot detect a misclassified expense or a miskeyed amount. Have your accountant review periodically
• We do our best to keep PlainBooks running 24/7, but we cannot guarantee 100% uptime. Maintenance, updates, and unforeseen issues happen
• If a third-party service we depend on (Stripe, Supabase, Cloudflare, Resend, Sentry) experiences downtime, parts of PlainBooks may be temporarily affected. See Section 7

11. Governing Law

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Missouri, United States, where Plain Books LLC is incorporated. If you have a dispute, please contact us at [email protected] first — we will work to resolve it directly. We strongly recommend consulting a legal professional before pursuing any formal action.

12. Changes to These Terms

We may update these terms as PlainBooks grows. If we make changes that affect your rights or how we handle your data, we will email you at least 14 days before the changes take effect. The updated date at the top of this page always reflects the latest version. If you continue using PlainBooks after a change, you accept the updated terms. If you disagree with a change, you can cancel and export your data.

13. Contact

Questions, concerns, or feedback about these terms or anything else:

[email protected]

We read every email. A real person will respond.

14. Change history

• May 19, 2026 — Reframed Sections 1, 3, 5, 6, 7, and 10 to match the current product. PlainBooks is now described as general-ledger bookkeeping software. Automatic bank-account ingestion (Plaid) and invoice-sync integrations (QuickBooks, Square, PayPal) described in earlier versions of these terms were removed in the 2026-05 product pivot and are not in the current build. The data path is direct journal-entry posting. The trial period and pricing are unchanged.
• May 11, 2026 — Updated Section 6 to clarify our AI promise wording and to describe the rules-based aggregate pattern extraction and parser sample retention that improves PlainBooks for everyone. Per-user opt-out is preserved at Settings → Privacy.
• April 3, 2026 — Initial version.