Privacy notice

Who we are

Accountants for Vets is a trading style of Buzz Accounting Ltd, registered in England and Wales, company number 15182358, VAT registration number GB481 882 554. Buzz Accounting Ltd is the data controller for the personal data described in this notice. You can reach us at hello@buzzaccounting.co.uk, and that address also reaches the person who deals with data protection questions.

The personal data we collect

• Enquiries. The name, email address, telephone number, practice name and message you type into the form on our contact page, or that you send us by email or WhatsApp.
• Newsletter subscribers. The email address you give us, and the page you subscribed from.
• Calculator results. The calculators on this site run entirely in your browser and nothing you type into them is sent to us. If you ask us to email you a result, we receive the email address you give us and the figures in that result.
• Clients. Once you engage us, everything needed to do the work: contact and identity details, the identification documents required for client due diligence under the Money Laundering Regulations, the practice's financial and accounting records, payroll data for your team, and — where we act for principals, partners or locums personally — National Insurance numbers, Unique Taxpayer References and the contents of tax returns.
• Technical data. Our host records standard server logs, including the IP address a page was requested from.

We do not buy personal data and we do not scrape it. Everything we hold comes from you, from someone at your practice acting on your behalf, from a previous accountant on professional clearance, or from public registers such as Companies House.

Why we use it, and our lawful basis

• Replying to an enquiry — Article 6(1)(b) UK GDPR, steps taken at your request before entering into a contract, and Article 6(1)(f), our legitimate interest in answering somebody who has asked us a question.
• Providing accountancy services — Article 6(1)(b), performance of our engagement contract with you.
• Client due diligence, tax filing and record keeping — Article 6(1)(c), compliance with our legal obligations, including the Money Laundering Regulations and HMRC's record-keeping requirements. Where an identification document reveals special category data we rely on Article 9(2)(g) and the substantial public interest condition for preventing or detecting unlawful acts in Schedule 1 to the Data Protection Act 2018.
• Running payroll for your team — Article 6(1)(b) as against you, and Article 6(1)(c) for the real time information reporting HMRC requires. Where a payroll record includes health information, for example statutory sick pay, we rely on Article 9(2)(b), obligations in the field of employment law.
• Sending our monthly email — Article 6(1)(a), your consent, which you can withdraw at any time using the unsubscribe link in every message.
• Keeping the site working and secure — Article 6(1)(f), our legitimate interest in a website that functions and is not abused.

Who else sees it

• Netlify hosts this website and processes the forms on it. When you send the contact form or the newsletter form, the submission passes through Netlify before it reaches us by email.
• Brevo sends our marketing email. If you subscribe, your email address is stored in Brevo until you unsubscribe or ask us to remove it.
• Our accounting, payroll and tax software providers, where your data has to sit in a system for us to do the work you have engaged us to do.
• HMRC, Companies House and — where you instruct us to — your bank, lender or prospective buyer's advisers, to make the filings and provide the information you have asked us to provide.
• Our professional indemnity insurers and professional bodies, where a claim or a regulatory enquiry makes that necessary.

We do not sell personal data, and we do not share it with anybody for their own marketing. We do not send anything to the RCVS, the VMD or the CMA about you or your practice. Where the CMA's Order requires a veterinary business to submit data to the RCVS for Find a Vet, that is your submission about your business rather than ours about you, and we would only ever help you prepare it on your instruction.

Sending data outside the UK

Some of the suppliers above operate outside the United Kingdom. Where personal data is transferred out of the UK we rely either on the UK's adequacy regulations for the destination country, or on the International Data Transfer Agreement or the UK Addendum to the European Commission's standard contractual clauses, alongside the supplier's own technical and organisational measures.

Cookies

This site sets no advertising cookies and no tracking pixels. It uses Google Analytics to count visits and see which pages are read, and that is gated behind your consent: nothing loads and no cookie is set unless you accept it on the banner, and declining changes nothing about how the site works. The only data your browser sends us is what is needed to serve you the page.

How long we keep it

• Enquiries that do not become engagements — up to 24 months, then deleted.
• Newsletter subscriptions — until you unsubscribe or ask us to delete the record, plus a suppression entry so we do not email you again by accident.
• Client records — at least six years after the end of the engagement, which is what tax record-keeping and the Money Laundering Regulations require of us. Your own retention obligations sit alongside ours and are not the same: under the Veterinary Medicines Regulations, documents relating to the receipt or supply of POM-V and POM-VPS products must be kept for five years, and so must the record of the reason for prescribing where no written prescription was issued.
• Payroll records — for the periods HMRC requires, and no longer than we need them to answer a query about a past year.
• Server logs — for the short retention period our host applies.

Your rights

Under the UK GDPR you have the right to ask us for a copy of the personal data we hold about you; to have inaccurate data corrected; to have data erased where we no longer have a reason to hold it; to restrict how we use it while a question about it is resolved; to receive data you gave us in a portable format; to object to processing we carry out on the basis of legitimate interests; and to withdraw consent to marketing at any time. Some of those rights are qualified where we are legally required to keep records — we cannot delete a tax record we are obliged to retain, and we will tell you plainly when that is the reason.

We make no decision about you by solely automated means and we do not carry out profiling. To exercise any right, email hello@buzzaccounting.co.uk. We will respond within one month, and there is no charge.

Complaints

If you are unhappy with how we have handled your personal data, please tell us first so that we can put it right. You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at any time:

Information Commissioner's Office, Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire SK9 5AF. Helpline 0303 123 1113. ico.org.uk.

Changes to this notice

If we change how we use personal data we will update this page, and where the change is significant we will tell subscribers and clients directly. This notice applies to accountantsforvets.co.uk and to the accountancy services provided under that name. Our engagement letter carries the confidentiality and data protection terms that apply once you become a client, and those terms prevail over this notice if the two ever differ. If anything here is unclear, ask us — we would rather answer than have you guess.