Legal

Delete your account.

You can start this yourself, from inside the app, and finish it in about a minute. This page also explains exactly what goes and what stays — because in an accounting system those are not the same question.

From inside the app.

This is the fastest route and it needs nothing from us.

1. Open Summely on your phone or at app.summely.com and sign in.
2. Go to More → Account → Delete my account.
3. Read what the screen tells you about each set of books you belong to.
4. Confirm with your password (and your authenticator code, if you use two-factor), then type DELETE.

It takes effect immediately. You are signed out on every device, and nothing you do afterwards can undo it.

Without the app.

You do not need to install anything to ask. Email privacy@summely.com from the address on the account, with the subject Delete my account. We verify that the request came from the account holder, then run exactly the same process described here and confirm by reply. We aim to complete it within 30 days, which is what our Privacy Policy commits to.

What is deleted.

• Your name and email address. The account row is retained only as an anonymous identifier — see below — and can no longer be signed in to, contacted or recovered.
• Your password, your two-factor secret and your recovery codes.
• Every device session, so nothing stays signed in anywhere.
• Any link between the account and Google or Apple sign-in.
• Any API keys you created. Integrations using them stop working at once.

What is kept, and why.

Summely holds your business’s financial records. Those records belong to the organization, not to any one login, and most jurisdictions require them to be kept for several years. Deleting a person cannot be allowed to delete a company’s books — so it does not.

• The books stay with the organization. Invoices, bills, payments, journal entries and attachments remain, and the other people in that organization keep working exactly as before.
• The audit trail keeps its shape. Entries you posted still show that they were posted by the same person, referred to by an anonymous identifier rather than by your name. Removing the link entirely would not protect you — it would rewrite a company’s financial history, which is the opposite of what an audit trail is for.
• Records we are required to keep. Invoices we issued you, and anything we need to resolve a dispute or meet a legal obligation, as set out in the Privacy Policy.

If you are the only owner.

Two situations, and they end differently.

Other people are still in the books. We will not delete your account yet, and the app says so plainly, naming the organization. Make somebody else an owner on the Team screen, or remove the other members, and then delete your account. We do not destroy a company’s records because one person left, and we do not pick who inherits them on your behalf — that decision has legal weight and it is not ours to make.

You are the only person there. Nobody else can inherit the books, so they can be deleted along with your account — but only if you switch that on for each organization by name, on the deletion screen. If the account has never taken a payment, those books are destroyed immediately. If money has changed hands, the subscription is cancelled straight away so nothing further is charged, and the records are destroyed 30 days later.

Deleting an organization on its own.

If you want a set of books deleted but want to keep your login — a company that has closed, or trial books you no longer need — write to privacy@summely.com from an owner’s address and say which organization. The same 30-day rule applies to books with a payment history.

Timing, and backups.

In-app deletion of your personal data is immediate. Encrypted backups are purged on a rolling schedule that does not exceed 90 days, so a copy may persist in backup storage for that period before it ages out; it is not accessible in the product and is not used for anything else. Server logs are retained for up to 12 months.

Questions about any of this go to privacy@summely.com, and our full Privacy Policy covers the rest.