Terms of Service

1. About these terms

These terms are an agreement between [company name], a company registered in England and Wales (company number [company number]) with its registered office at [registered office address] (“ContaScope”, “we”, “us”), and the business that creates a workspace (“you”). They cover your use of the ContaScope website and service (the “Service”).

ContaScope is for businesses and professionals, such as accountancy and bookkeeping firms. By creating a workspace you confirm that you are acting for a business or profession, that you are at least 18, and that you have authority to bind that business to these terms.

Our Privacy Policy and Cookies page explain how personal data is handled. Questions about these terms can go to contact@contascope.co.uk.

2. The Service

ContaScope monitors UK companies on the Companies House register that you add to your workspace. It shows their filing deadlines, detects changes, assigns a risk level, and sends alerts and a daily digest by email.

We may improve, change or remove features over time. If a change materially reduces what a paid plan offers, we will give you notice and the chance to cancel.

3. Companies House data and what we do not promise

The company information in ContaScope comes from the public register kept by Companies House and is used under the Open Government Licence. ContaScope is an independent product. It is not provided by, endorsed by or connected with Companies House or any government body.

Please read this section carefully, because your clients may rely on your work:

• Register data can be late, incomplete or wrong, and we cannot see anything that has not reached the register. We do not guarantee that it is accurate, complete or current.
• Deadlines, risk levels and alerts are aids. A deadline shown in ContaScope may differ from the real statutory deadline, for example after an extension, a change of accounting reference date or a late correction on the register. Check the register before you rely on a date.
• An alert might arrive late, or not at all, for example because of a Companies House outage, an email filter or a fault on our side. ContaScope does not replace your own diary, procedures or professional judgement.
• Nothing in the Service is legal, tax, accounting or other professional advice.
• You remain responsible for your clients’ filings and for what you advise them.

4. Your account and workspace

• The person who creates a workspace becomes its owner. The owner can invite colleagues, change the plan and delete the workspace.
• Give us accurate details and keep them up to date. You may be asked to confirm your email address.
• Keep passwords and invitation links private. You are responsible for everything done through your workspace, including by people you invite, and for removing people who should no longer have access.
• Tell us promptly at contact@contascope.co.uk if you think your account has been used without permission.
• One workspace is for one business. Do not share a login between different businesses or resell access to the Service without our written agreement.

5. Plans, prices and payment

The plans, prices and the number of companies each plan can monitor are shown on our pricing page. Prices are in pounds sterling. Where VAT applies it is added at the rate in force.

• Free plan. Provided as is, with the company limit shown on the pricing page. We may change or withdraw it with reasonable notice.
• Paid plans. Billed in advance, monthly or yearly, and renewed automatically until cancelled. Payments are handled by Stripe. We do not see or store your full card number.
• Changing or cancelling. You can change plan, update your card or cancel at any time from Settings, which opens the Stripe customer portal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of the period you have paid for, and you keep your paid limits until then.
• Refunds. Payments are not refundable for periods already started, except where the law says otherwise or we agree in writing.
• Failed payment. If a payment fails and is not put right, your workspace falls back to the Free limits. Nothing is deleted. Your existing companies stay monitored, but you cannot add more until you are within the limit or pay.
• Limits. Moving to a smaller plan never deletes companies, but you cannot add new ones while you are over the limit.
• Price changes. We will give at least 30 days’ notice by email before a price increase applies to you. If you do not accept it, cancel before it takes effect.

6. Acceptable use

You agree not to:

• use the Service unlawfully, or to harass, defraud or mislead anyone;
• try to get into accounts, workspaces or systems that are not yours, or probe, scan or test the Service for weaknesses without our written permission;
• overload the Service, or use bots, scrapers or the Service itself to build a competing database of Companies House data;
• upload malicious code, or content you have no right to upload;
• copy, decompile or reverse engineer the Service, except as the law allows;
• use the Service to create or rely on credit decisions, or use it for any purpose other than monitoring companies as part of your business.

7. Your data

You keep all rights in what you put into your workspace: your client list, tags, notes, imported files and settings (“Your Content”). You give us permission to store and process it only to run the Service for you, to keep it secure and to meet the law.

You can export your clients and deadlines as CSV at any time. The workspace owner can delete the workspace from Settings, which removes Your Content from our live systems. Copies in backups are overwritten on a rolling schedule.

You promise that you are allowed to add the companies you add and to use any personal data in Your Content for this purpose. Please do not put sensitive information in free-text notes, such as health data or card details, because the Service does not need it.

8. Data protection

Both of us will follow the UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018. Our Privacy Policy describes which personal data we handle and why. The roles are:

• For account details (names, work email addresses, sign-in data) and billing data, we are an independent controller.
• For personal data that you put into your workspace, we are your processor and you are the controller. The rest of this section is our data processing agreement for that data.

As your processor we will:

• process that personal data only on your documented instructions, which are these terms and your use of the Service, unless the law requires otherwise (and we will tell you if so, where allowed);
• make sure that people with access to it are bound by confidentiality;
• keep it secure with measures suitable to the risk, including encrypted connections, hashed passwords, and separation between workspaces;
• use only the sub-processors listed in our Privacy Policy, which you authorise, bind them to equivalent terms, and give you notice of any new one so you can object;
• help you respond to requests from individuals, and with security, breach notification and impact assessments, taking into account what we know;
• tell you without undue delay after we become aware of a personal data breach affecting it;
• delete it when the workspace is deleted or the agreement ends, unless the law requires us to keep it, and let you export it first;
• give you the information needed to show our compliance, and allow reasonable audits on notice, no more than once a year unless a breach or a regulator requires otherwise.

The subject matter is providing the Service; the duration is the life of your workspace; the personal data is the names and details of people in Your Content; the people concerned are your staff and the individuals connected with your clients.

9. Availability and support

We aim to keep the Service running, but we do not promise it will be uninterrupted or error free. We may pause it for maintenance, and it depends on services we do not control, including Companies House. Support is by email at contact@contascope.co.uk and we answer as quickly as we reasonably can.

10. Our rights

The Service, including its software, design, text and the way data is organised and scored, belongs to us or our licensors. You get a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable right to use it for your business while these terms apply. Company information from the register remains subject to the Open Government Licence. If you send us feedback, we may use it freely and without payment.

11. Our responsibility to you

Nothing in these terms limits liability that cannot be limited by law, including liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for anything else that the law does not allow us to exclude.

Subject to that:

• The Service is provided “as is”. We exclude all warranties and conditions that the law lets us exclude.
• We are not liable for loss of profit, loss of clients, loss of goodwill, loss of business or any indirect or consequential loss.
• In particular, we are not liable for penalties, fines, strike-off, late filing or other consequences for you or your clients that follow from a deadline, change or alert that was late, missing or wrong. Section 3 explains why you must not rely on the Service alone.
• Our total liability for all claims arising from the Service in any 12-month period is limited to the fees you paid us in the 12 months before the event that gave rise to the claim, or £100 if you paid nothing.

12. Suspension and ending the agreement

You can stop using the Service at any time by cancelling your plan and, if you wish, deleting your workspace.

We may suspend or end your access if you seriously or repeatedly break these terms, if you do not pay, or if we must do so to comply with the law or to protect the Service and other customers. Where we reasonably can, we will warn you first and give you time to fix the problem. We may also end the Service as a whole, with at least 30 days’ notice and a refund of any prepaid fees for the period after it ends.

Sections that by their nature should continue (including liability, data protection and governing law) continue after the agreement ends.

13. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. For changes that matter to you we will email the workspace owner at least 30 days before they apply. If you carry on using the Service after that date you accept the new terms. If you do not agree, you can cancel before then. The date at the top of this page shows when the text last changed.

14. General

• Whole agreement. These terms, together with the Privacy Policy, are the whole agreement about the Service and replace anything said before.
• Other people. Only you and we can enforce these terms. Nobody else has rights under them under the Contracts (Rights of Third Parties) Act 1999.
• Transfer. You may not transfer your rights without our consent. We may transfer ours to a successor of the business and will tell you if we do.
• Events outside our control. We are not responsible for failures caused by events beyond our reasonable control.
• If part is unenforceable. The rest stays in force. If we do not enforce a right straight away, we have not given it up.
• Notices. We will send notices to the email address on your account. Write to us at contact@contascope.co.uk or at [registered office address].
• Governing law. These terms and any dispute about them are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction.