Privacy Policy — HOA Dues by Skeptic Dog

This Privacy Policy explains how Skeptic Dog Software, Ltd. Co., a Texas limited liability company (“Skeptic Dog”, “we”, “us”, or “our”) collects, uses, shares, and protects information when you use HOA Dues by Skeptic Dog at hoa.skepticdogsoftware.com, including its administrator console and the HOA Dues app for QuickBooks Online (together, the “Service”). It covers these groups of people:

Administrators — the people who sign in to manage a homeowners association (“association”) in the Service;
Team invitees — people an administrator invites to join an account;
Homeowners — the unit owners whose records an association keeps in the Service so that it can bill their dues, including when they open a prepay link;
Visitors — anyone who visits hoa.skepticdogsoftware.com; and
People who contact us — anyone who sends us a message through the contact form on hoa.skepticdogsoftware.com or by email.

1. What the Service does

An association’s administrator connects the association’s QuickBooks Online company to the Service. The Service then creates each homeowner’s monthly dues invoice in that QuickBooks company, and QuickBooks emails the invoice to the homeowner. Homeowners pay the association — online through QuickBooks Payments where the association has turned it on, or any other way the association accepts (for example, by check). The Service can also email a homeowner a link to an optional annual prepay invoice.

2. Our role and the association’s role

For homeowner information, our Customer — the association, or the management company acting for it — decides what goes into the Service and how dues are billed; we process it on the Customer’s behalf and instructions, and use it only for that association, to provide, maintain and secure the Service and comply with law. An association whose records are held in a management company’s account may contact us; we’ll ask the account owner whether to send the association a copy of them or delete them, and we’ll delete what we obtained from the association’s QuickBooks company where the law or Intuit’s rules require. For administrator accounts, team invitations, website visits and messages sent to us, we decide how the information is used, as this Policy describes.

If you are a homeowner and have a question about your record — or want to see, correct, or delete it — please contact your association (see Section 10).

3. Information we collect

Administrator accounts and team invitations

Your email address and your role in the account.
The organization the account is for — its legal name and type (an association, a management company, or another business) — named at sign-up, or by a new account owner when accepting an ownership transfer.
For a team invitation: the invitee’s email address, the role offered, and which administrator sent it.
Your agreement to our Terms of Service: which version you accepted (with a fingerprint of its exact text), when, for which organization, which statement you made (on the organization’s behalf, or to use the Service for it), and where — at sign-up, when accepting an invitation, when accepting an ownership transfer, or at sign-in after the Terms change — or, if you declined a change, that you declined it and when. Stripe records your agreement when you subscribe, and we keep a record of it with the account — who subscribed, the version of the Terms and the checkout session. We keep these records for 7 years after the account closes (Section 8). If a sign-up is never confirmed, its record of agreement is deleted after 7 days, and the unconfirmed sign-in (your email address) stays in Amazon Cognito until the same address signs up again.
Sign-in data held by our identity provider, Amazon Cognito: your passkeys and your authenticator-app (TOTP) enrollment. Passwords are stored and checked only by Amazon Cognito, in a form we can’t read. Passkey fingerprint or face checks happen only on your device; we receive only a public key, never biometric data.

QuickBooks Online connection

The OAuth access and refresh tokens QuickBooks issues when an administrator connects a company, and which administrator connected it. The tokens are encrypted with a customer-managed key in AWS Key Management Service (KMS) before they are stored.
The QuickBooks company ID (“realm ID”) and the status of the connection. When an administrator disconnects QuickBooks, we delete the stored connection tokens but keep the company’s ID, so that a later connection to a different company can be checked; it is deleted with the rest of the association’s data (Section 8).

Association, unit, and owner records

Association details and settings: its name, time zone, fiscal year, invoice timing and payment terms, dues schedules and rates, prepay settings, and the QuickBooks item and income account used for dues.
Unit records, such as each unit’s label, dues schedule, and billing start date.
Owner records: owners’ names, email addresses, ownership dates, and the QuickBooks customer ID each owner is linked to.

Billing ledger

Which months were invoiced for each unit, and each invoice’s QuickBooks ID, number, total, and status (for example open, partly paid, or paid) as read from QuickBooks.
Annual prepay quotes and invoices and their status. A prepay link carries a random token; we store only a one-way hash of it. The link itself appears in the email we send the homeowner and on the monthly invoice in QuickBooks.

Subscription

The association’s subscription to the Service — its plan and status, and the Stripe customer and subscription identifiers. Card details are entered on Stripe’s payment page and go to Stripe, never to us.

Website visitors

When you visit hoa.skepticdogsoftware.com, Amazon CloudFront and AWS WAF (our web firewall) process your IP address and request details at the AWS edge location that serves you — which may be outside the United States — to deliver the site, and for security and rate limiting.

Contact form

When you send us a message through our contact form, we collect your name, your email address, your company (if you give one), and your message.
We email them to our team inbox, with your email address as the reply-to address so that we can answer you. The Service does not store your message in its database; it stays in our team inbox until we delete it.
Each submission is also recorded as a security event: a one-way, salted hash of your email address (never the address itself), together with the IP address and browser user-agent it came from. We use these records to detect and stop abuse of the form.

Security and operational logs

Sign-ins, session renewals and checks (each time the console confirms you’re still signed in), and account-security events, including the IP address and browser user-agent involved.
Service logs needed to run, troubleshoot, and protect the Service.

Cookies and browser storage

The console uses cookies only to keep you signed in: a session cookie, a refresh cookie (kept up to 30 days when “Keep me signed in” is ticked — it is ticked by default; untick it to be signed out when you close the browser), a cookie that ties the two to your sign-in, and a short-lived cookie while you set up a passkey or authenticator or accept updated Terms.
The site remembers your light or dark theme choice in your browser’s local storage. While you sign in to accept an ownership transfer, the transfer link is held briefly in your browser’s session storage.
We do not use analytics, advertising, or cross-site tracking scripts or cookies.

What we do not collect

We never receive, process, or store card or bank-account data — not homeowners’ (they pay the association through QuickBooks or however the association accepts payment) and not the association’s (its subscription is paid through Stripe).

4. How we use information

We use information only to provide, maintain and secure the Service and comply with law:

to create dues invoices in the association’s QuickBooks company and have QuickBooks email them, keep track of which months have been invoiced and paid, and offer annual prepay invoices;
to send administrators account and service email (including team invitations, ownership-transfer requests, sign-in codes, and the warning before an association’s data is deleted), and to send homeowners prepay-offer email;
to read and answer messages sent to us;
to bill the association for its subscription to the Service;
to secure the Service and prevent fraud and abuse; and
to comply with legal obligations.

We do not sell or rent personal information, and we do not share it for advertising.

5. QuickBooks Online (Intuit)

When an association connects its QuickBooks Online company, it authorizes HOA Dues to read and write that company’s data through Intuit’s API. We process that data for the association only to provide the Service. We do not process it on Intuit’s behalf, and Intuit is not our service provider. Intuit handles QuickBooks data independently, under the association’s agreement with Intuit and the Intuit Global Privacy Statement.

What passes between the Service and the association’s QuickBooks company:

Sent to QuickBooks: each owner’s name and email address — to create the owner’s QuickBooks customer unless the association turns this off (it is on by default), shown as “<unit> - <owner names>” with the owner’s email as its primary email, or to use an existing customer whose name exactly matches the one HOA Dues would create — and as each invoice’s billing and send-to address; a short HOA Dues reference in the customer’s notes and in each invoice’s private note, so the Service can recognize its own records; a “HOA Dues” service item, if the association doesn’t already have one (looked up by name first); the invoices themselves (the months billed, amounts, due dates, and a memo that may carry the owner’s prepay link), each with QuickBooks’ online card and bank-transfer (ACH) payment options turned on; and the voiding of prepay invoices, as our Terms describe (Section 2).
Read from QuickBooks: the company’s basic information when an administrator connects it, to confirm which company it is; the association’s income accounts (to choose where dues are recorded); its customer list, including names and email addresses, so an administrator can link units to existing customers — we store only the customers the administrator chooses to import or link; the “HOA Dues” item, looked up by name; each invoice’s status and balance (open, partly paid, paid, or voided); the online-payment link QuickBooks makes for a prepay invoice, which we store to show the homeowner; invoices by customer and date, to recover one whose creation was interrupted so it is never created twice; and Intuit’s change notices for invoices, payments and customers in a connected company, which tell the Service to check them again.
Test associations: in a test association (which uses a QuickBooks sandbox company), every email address sent to QuickBooks for it, and every prepay email we send for it, is an administrator’s address — the administrator who acted, or else the account owner — instead of the owners’ addresses.

6. Email

Dues invoices are emailed by QuickBooks, from the association’s QuickBooks company. Prepay offers, team invitations, ownership-transfer requests, account-recovery codes, the notice that an account was recovered, and the warning before an association’s data is deleted are sent by us through Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) from hoa.skepticdogsoftware.com. Sign-up confirmation and password-reset codes are sent through Amazon Web Services (Amazon Cognito). Stripe emails payment receipts and billing notices for the subscription to its billing email. Messages sent through our contact form, and anything you email us, are delivered to our team inbox, which is hosted by Google Workspace.

7. Service providers and sharing

We use these service providers to run the Service and share information with them only for that purpose:

Amazon Web Services (AWS) — hosting, database storage, encryption keys (KMS), sign-in (Amazon Cognito) and email delivery (Amazon SES), in the us-east-1 region of the United States; and content delivery and web firewall (Amazon CloudFront, AWS WAF), which handle website requests at AWS edge locations worldwide.
Stripe, Inc. — processes the association’s subscription payment to Skeptic Dog. Stripe receives the email address of the administrator who first subscribes for the account, the association’s name (on its subscription), and the organization’s name in the agreement shown at checkout, under Stripe’s privacy policy.
Google LLC (Google Workspace) — hosts our team email (team@skepticdogsoftware.com), which receives contact-form messages and anything you email us.

Intuit is not on this list: see Section 5.

We may also disclose information if the law requires it, or to protect the rights, safety, and security of the Service, our customers, or others.

Business transfers. If Skeptic Dog is involved in a merger, acquisition, reorganization, or sale of all or part of its business, information may be transferred as part of that transaction to a successor that continues to provide the Service and must honor this Policy.

8. Retention, disconnection, and deletion

An association’s data — its settings, units, owners, billing ledger, and what HOA Dues read from its QuickBooks company — is kept while the association uses the Service. Administrators can change or delete parts of it in the console at any time — for example, editing a unit’s owner details, deleting a unit that has no billing history yet, deleting a dues schedule, or removing a team member. To delete a homeowner’s record that can’t be deleted in the console (for example, a unit with billing history), ask us for help at team@skepticdogsoftware.com.
30 days after an association stops, all of its data is deleted. An association stops when its subscription ends (a live association) or when its QuickBooks connection ends — disconnected in the console, from inside QuickBooks, or refused by QuickBooks when HOA Dues renews it (revoked or expired). The 30 days run from the first of these that happened. To stop the deletion, restore whatever stopped before its date: reconnect QuickBooks, and resubscribe — or, if Stripe marked the subscription unpaid, pay its open invoice under Billing → Manage billing. Otherwise HOA Dues deletes everything it holds for that association — including the QuickBooks company ID it kept and what it read from QuickBooks, which it keeps for those 30 days so that reconnecting picks up where the association left off — except identifiers in service and security logs, which age out as stated below. We try to email the account owner 7 days before, saying what will be deleted and when; the deletion happens on its date either way.
If the association’s subscription is still running when its data is deleted (for example, because QuickBooks stayed disconnected), HOA Dues first cancels the subscription and refunds the unused part of what was paid for its current period to the card it was paid with (or another way if that refund fails); a period that wasn’t paid isn’t refunded.
The account owner or an admin — or Intuit on the association’s behalf — may ask us to delete an association’s data sooner, and the account owner may close the account (deleting its associations’ data and its administrators’ sign-ins), by emailing team@skepticdogsoftware.com. We delete once the association’s subscription has been canceled — we cancel it for you, with a refund of the unused part of what was paid for its current period — and the deletion also disconnects HOA Dues from the association’s QuickBooks company.
We keep the record of each acceptance of these Terms — who accepted, the version and a fingerprint of its text, the organization, where and when — the record of any decline, and the agreement Stripe recorded at checkout (who subscribed, and the version), for 7 years after an account closes, and we keep data longer only where the law requires us to — for example, to preserve evidence for a lawsuit, investigation or legal claim that is pending or reasonably expected, or to answer a lawful request — and only for that purpose.
While an association’s subscription has ended, HOA Dues doesn’t read from or write to its QuickBooks company — apart from confirming which company it is when an administrator connects it. Once a day HOA Dues checks that each other connected association’s QuickBooks connection is still authorized — a sign-in renewal with Intuit that reads none of the company’s data — so a disconnection made from inside QuickBooks is noticed within a day. Billing runs when QuickBooks is connected, the association isn’t paused or still in setup, and — for a live association — its subscription is active; a test association needs no subscription.
Data we delete remains in encrypted point-in-time database backups for up to 35 days after it is deleted, and then can’t be recovered.
Service logs are kept for up to one year. Security events — sign-ins, session renewals and checks, account-security changes and contact-form submissions — are kept for 400 days.
Some records expire sooner: prepay quotes after 30 minutes; run logs after 30 days; prepay offer links expire, and their records are deleted 90 days after the link expires; invitation and ownership-transfer links work for 7 days; recovery codes for 10 minutes; and the record of a sign-up’s agreement to the Terms is deleted after 7 days if the email address is never confirmed (the unconfirmed sign-in itself — the email address — stays in Amazon Cognito until the same address signs up again). The database deletes expired records within a few days of their expiry.
Messages sent to us — through the contact form or by email — stay in our team inbox until we delete them.
An email address that bounces or files a spam complaint stays on our email provider’s (Amazon SES) suppression list, so we don’t email it again.
Administrator accounts — each team member’s email address, role and sign-in — are kept until the account is closed (or the member is removed).
A removed team member’s sign-in identity (their email address and sign-in factors) stays in Amazon Cognito until they ask us to delete it; closing an account deletes the sign-ins of its current administrators and the records of who was removed from it (their records of acceptance are kept as stated above).
Our billing records at Stripe — the Customer’s Stripe customer record (billing email, name and address), its subscriptions, invoices, payments and refunds — are kept in our Stripe account as our financial records and are not deleted with the Service’s data. Stripe’s own records follow Stripe’s retention rules.
Invoices, customers and payments in QuickBooks belong to the association’s QuickBooks company: deleting data from the Service deletes nothing in QuickBooks, and an open invoice stays open there.

Disconnecting QuickBooks in the console (Settings → QuickBooks → Disconnect from QuickBooks) asks Intuit to revoke our access and deletes the stored connection tokens (HOA Dues keeps the company’s ID so a later connection to a different company can be checked). The association’s data is deleted 30 days later — or 30 days after its subscription ended, if that came first — unless whatever stopped is restored first, as described above.
Switching an association to a different QuickBooks company (Settings → QuickBooks → Switch company) asks Intuit to revoke our access to the previous company; the association’s billing history with that company stays with the association until the association’s data is deleted.
Disconnecting from inside QuickBooks ends our access at Intuit right away (so does QuickBooks refusing the connection for another reason, such as an expired authorization). HOA Dues finds out on the association’s next scheduled run, at the daily connection check, or when an administrator uses a QuickBooks lookup in the console — whichever comes first; an association whose subscription has ended makes no QuickBooks call (its data is already due for deletion 30 days after the subscription ended). Until HOA Dues finds out, the console may still show QuickBooks as connected; after that it shows Needs reconnect, and the connection’s 30-day period runs from then. Either way, Reconnect under Settings → QuickBooks restores it; if you don’t plan to reconnect, choose Disconnect from QuickBooks there to remove the connection tokens HOA Dues stored. Only the association’s account owner or an admin sees those buttons.

9. Security

We encrypt the Service’s data at rest, and in transit between your browser and the Service and between the Service and AWS, Intuit, and Stripe. We send email using TLS whenever the receiving mail server supports it; otherwise email may travel unencrypted, as can email QuickBooks sends. QuickBooks connection tokens and the Service’s database are encrypted with customer-managed keys in AWS KMS. Every session requires a passkey or an authenticator code, set up at first sign-in. We limit each part of the Service to the access it needs. No system is perfectly secure.

10. Your choices and rights

Administrators may ask to access, correct, or delete their personal information, or for a copy of it, by emailing team@skepticdogsoftware.com. We respond within 45 days. The account owner or an admin may ask us to delete an association’s data, and the account owner may close the account (Section 8).
Homeowners: your association controls your record — please contact your association to see, correct, or delete it. If you send a request to us instead, we forward it to your association within 10 business days and help it respond.
We don’t sell personal information; Nevada residents may send requests to team@skepticdogsoftware.com.
If your state’s law gives you more rights, we honor them as that law requires.

11. How we respond to Do Not Track signals

We don’t track you across other websites, so we don’t change anything in response to Do Not Track signals, and no other party collects information about your activity over time and across websites through HOA Dues pages.

12. Children

The Service is for associations and their administrators, who must be at least 18. It is not directed to children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from them.

13. Changes to this Policy

We may update this Policy. We will post the new version here with its effective date and, for a material change, tell each account owner by email at least 30 days before it takes effect; each administrator is asked to accept the updated Terms and confirm they have read this Policy at their next sign-in after it does. We won’t use information we already hold in a materially different way than this Policy described when we collected it without the consent the law requires.

14. Contact

Privacy questions or requests: team@skepticdogsoftware.com. Skeptic Dog Software, Ltd. Co. is based in Durango, Colorado, USA; legal notices go to its registered agent at 5900 Balcones Dr, Ste 100, Austin, TX 78731. See also our Terms of Service.