Security

Connecting your books to a service you haven't used before is a real decision. This page sets out exactly what CashWatchdog can see, what it keeps, and how to cut it off, so you can judge it for yourself.

Quick answers for business owners and bookkeepers

• What does Intuit ask me to approve? Broad accounting access. QuickBooks does not offer a narrower permission for this connection, even though CashWatchdog itself only uses the access to read invoice and company information.
• Will you change my books or chase customers? No. CashWatchdog never edits invoices or sends payment reminders to customers. It notifies you of overdue items, so you can decide whether to follow up.
• What remains stored? Your subscription and account settings, encrypted connection credentials and company details, and a record that an alert was sent. Invoice bodies are not copied into our database. Alert emails contain customer names and amounts, so the email provider also processes those emails.
• Can I revoke access? Yes. Disconnect from your CashWatchdog account page or in QuickBooks itself. When your subscription ends, we attempt to revoke access and delete the saved key. If Intuit's revocation cannot be confirmed, remove CashWatchdog in QuickBooks' connected apps to confirm access is cut off.
• Are you in the QuickBooks App Store or SOC 2 certified? Not yet. We have completed the security assessment Intuit required before granting live access, but we don't have an App Store listing or a SOC 2 report.

Compare CashWatchdog with QuickBooks' built-in reminders.

What we ask QuickBooks for

QuickBooks offers apps one permission for accounting data, and it's a broad one. There's no narrower, read-only option, so that's the permission Intuit's connection screen will show you.

What we actually do with it:

• Once each morning we ask QuickBooks, for each company you connect, for unpaid invoices that are past their due date, and for a count of your unpaid invoices.
• When you connect a company, we also read the company's name, so our emails can say which company they're about. Nothing else.
• We never create, change or delete anything in QuickBooks.
• We never contact your customers. Alerts go only to you, and to anyone you add yourself, who is told they were added and can stop them.

Before issuing us live access, Intuit required a security and compliance assessment of this app. We completed it.

What we keep, and what we don't

We keep:

• Your email address, your plan, your alert settings and any extra recipients you add.
• The key that lets us read from QuickBooks (one for each company you connect), encrypted. The encryption key lives in our hosting environment, not in the database, so a copy of the database alone can't be used to reach your books.
• The ID and name of each QuickBooks company you connect, also encrypted.
• For each invoice alert, an identity record used to limit repeated alerts. The initial overdue alert and the 30-day reminder are separate. The record holds the invoice's ID and a one-way fingerprint of your company, and nothing about the invoice itself.
• An encrypted nightly backup of the database, kept for 30 days on GitHub (where our code lives), so the service can be restored if something breaks. The QuickBooks keys inside it stay encrypted with a key the backup doesn't contain.

We don't keep copies of your invoices. Your customers' names and the amounts they owe appear in the email we send you, and aren't stored in our database. Our email provider, Resend, keeps a copy of sent emails for a limited time, as email services do.

The free check

The free check reads your overdue invoices once. Then we attempt to revoke our access at Intuit straight away. No invoice result or connection key is saved in our database and no account is created. The result is shown only in your own browser, in an encrypted cookie that expires after ten minutes. Operational error logs and aggregate usage counts are described in our privacy policy. If revocation cannot be confirmed, the result tells you to remove CashWatchdog in QuickBooks' connected apps.

How to cut us off

Any of these works, at any time:

• Cancel your subscription. You keep what you've paid for until the end of the billing period. When it ends, we attempt to revoke our access at Intuit and delete the saved key even if Intuit's revocation fails.
• Disconnect from your account page. We attempt to revoke our access and delete the saved key straight away. Your subscription carries on until you cancel it.
• Disconnect us from inside QuickBooks, in its list of connected apps. You don't need to ask us.

Deleting our saved key and Intuit confirming revocation are different outcomes. If you need to confirm the grant is removed, use QuickBooks' connected apps.

The website

• HTTPS only. Connections using TLS older than 1.2 are refused, and browsers are told never to use plain HTTP for this site.
• No scripts at all. No trackers, analytics, ads or third-party code. The site tells browsers to refuse any script, so none can be slipped in. We count visits, free-tool uses and answers to our optional 'what stopped you?' question as simple daily totals, with no cookies and nothing that identifies you.
• Waitlist abuse controls. A signed timestamp makes automated instant submissions fail quietly, known disposable-mail domains are skipped, and a keyed one-way fingerprint of the submitting IP address limits accepted waitlist signups to three per hour. The raw address is not stored by us for this limit; expired rate-limit records are purged as waitlist traffic arrives.
• No framing. Other sites can't show our pages inside theirs, which blocks tricks that disguise a button as something else.
• Links that sign you in are swapped for clean addresses as soon as you open them, so a working sign-in link doesn't stay in your browser history.
• Payments go through Stripe. We never see your card number.

Where it runs

The app runs on Vercel and the database on Neon, both in the eastern United States. Stripe handles payments and Resend sends email. They're listed in our privacy policy with what each one handles.

What we don't have yet

CashWatchdog is new. We don't have a SOC 2 report or a QuickBooks App Store listing yet. This page is here so you can judge what we actually do, rather than take a badge on trust.

Who's behind it

CashWatchdog is built and run by Pierce Rowe, a sole proprietor in Fort Wayne, Indiana. If you have a question about any of this, or you think you've found a security problem, email hello@cashwatchdog.com and you'll get a reply from me.