Privacy policy

Overview

Looped provides time tracking, invoicing, accounting and payroll tools for small businesses and the bookkeepers who work with them. This privacy policy applies to all Looped applications and services, including Looped Track, Invoices, Financials, Payroll and Manage, and to the assistant that works across them (Chat and Routines).

We only collect data that is necessary to provide and improve our services. We do not sell your data to third parties, and we never will.

Data Controller

The controller of your personal data is:

"Personal data" means any information relating to an identified or identifiable individual. This policy does not apply to anonymised or de-identified data from which no individual can reasonably be identified.

Controller vs Processor

Looped acts as a data controller when you create an account, visit our websites, or interact with us directly.

When you use Looped in a team or organisation context, the account owner or organisation administrator is typically the data controller for team member data, and Looped acts as a data processor on their behalf. If you have questions about how your organisation handles your data, please contact your account administrator.

The same applies to the records a company keeps in Looped about other people: its clients, its suppliers and, in Payroll, its employees. The company is the responsible party (the controller) for that data, and Looped is its operator (the processor under POPIA), processing it only to provide the service the company has asked for. If you are an employee and your employer runs payroll in Looped, please contact your employer about your personal information. We will help them respond.

Information We Collect

Account Information

When you create a Looped account, we collect:

• Email address
• Name
• Profile picture (from your OAuth provider)

We use Auth0 for secure authentication. Your login credentials are managed by Auth0 and your chosen OAuth provider (Google, Microsoft, etc.) - we never see or store your passwords.

Time Tracking Data (Looped Track)

To provide time tracking functionality, we store:

• Time entries with duration, task names, and descriptions
• Project information including titles, codes, and statuses
• Team member assignments and roles
• Custom tags for organizing your work
• Email reminder preferences (address, frequency, timezone)
• Custom report configurations

Invoicing Data (Looped Invoices)

To enable invoicing functionality, we store:

• Client information: names, VAT numbers, email addresses, phone numbers
• Business addresses (your address and client addresses)
• Invoice details: line items, amounts, dates, statuses
• Bank account information for payment instructions
• Payment integration credentials (encrypted)
• Invoice styling preferences

Accounting Data (Looped Financials)

To keep your company's books, we store:

• Bank statements you import: transaction dates, descriptions, amounts and balances
• Your company's bank accounts (account numbers are encrypted)
• Ledger accounts, journal entries, opening balances and financial years
• Suppliers, bills and payments
• Fixed assets, VAT and tax figures and your reports
• Notes and documents you add, such as annual financial statement notes and attachments

Payroll Data (Looped Payroll)

Looped Payroll is available to companies registered in South Africa. To run payroll, prepare statutory returns and issue payslips and tax certificates, we store the following about each employee your company adds:

• Name, email address, date of birth (encrypted) and job title
• Identity, passport or permit number, tax number and tax status (the numbers are encrypted)
• Home address (encrypted) and phone numbers
• Bank account details for salary payments (the account number is encrypted)
• Salary, pay items, working schedule and, where you use Track, hours worked
• Medical aid, retirement fund and tax directive details used in the tax calculation
• UIF, SDL, COIDA and ETI details, and maternity, adoption or illness leave recorded for the UIF declaration
• The end date and reason when employment ends
• Payslips, tax certificates (IRP5 and IT3(a)) and the returns prepared from them
• Payslips and reports imported from another payroll system, such as Sage (the imported files are encrypted)

Every change to an employee's details is kept as a dated version, and an audit log records who made it. Only the company's owners and the people they give a payroll role can open Payroll. Employees who are invited to My pay can see their own payslips and tax certificates, and nobody else's.

Payroll sends Financials the totals of each pay run for the company's ledger. It does not send individual employee details there.

Calendar Integration Data

When you connect your calendar to Looped Track, we access calendar data strictly for the purpose of importing events as time entries. This is a read-only integration.

Google Calendar:

• Access scopes: openid, email, profile, calendar.readonly
• Data accessed: Event subjects, start times, and end times from your selected calendar
• Data stored: OAuth tokens (encrypted), selected calendar ID, imported event IDs
• We do not access event attendees, locations, descriptions, or any other calendar metadata

Microsoft Calendar:

• Access scopes: openid, profile, email, User.Read, Calendars.Read, offline_access
• Data accessed: Event subjects, start times, and end times from your selected calendar
• Data stored: OAuth tokens (encrypted), account email, selected calendar ID, imported event IDs
• We do not access event attendees, locations, descriptions, or any other calendar metadata

Important: You can disconnect your calendar at any time from your Looped Track settings. When you disconnect, we immediately delete all stored OAuth tokens and calendar integration data. Previously imported time entries remain in your account but are no longer linked to calendar events.

Payment Processing

We integrate with several payment processors to enable invoice payments:

• Stripe
• Yoco
• Payfast

Payment data (credit card numbers, banking information) is handled directly by these PCI-compliant processors. We never see or store your customers' payment card details.

We store: checkout session IDs, integration parameters, and merchant credentials (encrypted) required to facilitate payments on your behalf.

Your own Looped subscription is billed by our affiliate Looped Automation LLC through Stripe. It holds the details it needs to bill you, such as your billing email, plan and payment history. Stripe processes your card details, and we never see or store your card number.

Analytics and Product Usage

We use PostHog for product analytics with privacy-focused configuration:

• User profiles are created only for signed-in users
• Feature flag data for product features
• Usage patterns to improve our products
• Session recordings in the apps, so we can see how the interface is used (see below)
• All analytics are proxied through our own infrastructure

We don't send the contents of your records to analytics: no amounts, bank details, client or employee details go to PostHog.

Session recordings capture the interface: labels, headings, buttons, navigation and error messages. The data on screen is masked in your browser before the recording is sent to PostHog. Everything you type into a form is masked, every digit is replaced with an asterisk so amounts and figures can't be read, and email addresses are starred out. Table contents, dropdown options and anything we've marked as customer data, such as client and employee names, descriptions, memos and bank account labels, are masked in full. Recordings don't include network requests or responses, or console output.

In Looped Payroll every piece of text is masked, because nearly every screen shows salaries, ID numbers or addresses.

We do NOT collect:

• Precise location data
• Device fingerprints
• Browsing history outside of Looped

AI-Powered Features

When you use AI-powered features in Looped, we send certain data to third-party AI providers for processing:

• Calendar event titles (for smart time entry suggestions)
• Task names and descriptions
• Time entry data (durations, project names)
• Bank statement line descriptions and amounts, when Financials suggests an account for each line
• Documents you ask Looped to read, such as a document you draft an invoice from
• Your messages to Chat and Routines, and the records the assistant reads to answer them. Depending on what you ask, this can include client, invoice, ledger or payroll details.

This data is sent only when you actively use AI features. Our AI providers process this data solely to provide the requested functionality. When accessed via their APIs, these providers do not use your data to train their models. If you prefer not to have this data processed by AI providers, you can choose not to use AI-powered features.

We may use the following AI providers:

• OpenAI: Privacy Policy
• Anthropic: Privacy Policy

We do NOT send to AI providers:

• Your account credentials or passwords
• Payment card details (we never receive or store them)
• Integration secrets such as OAuth tokens and API keys

Note: If you include personal information in your calendar event titles, task names, descriptions or chat messages (such as someone's name), that information may be sent to AI providers when you use these features.

Cookies

We use cookies for essential functionality only:

• Authentication cookies (Auth0 session, domain: .looped.sh)
• Theme preference cookie (dark/light mode)
• Team preference cookies

We do not use advertising cookies or third-party tracking cookies. Our services do not respond to "Do Not Track" browser signals because we do not engage in cross-site tracking.

How We Use Your Information

We use your data exclusively to:

• Provide and maintain our time tracking, invoicing, accounting and payroll services
• Keep your company's books, and prepare its reports and tax figures
• Calculate payroll, issue payslips and tax certificates, and prepare statutory returns for your company to submit
• Process your time entries and generate reports
• Create and send invoices on your behalf
• Import calendar events into your time tracking workspace
• Send email notifications and reminders you've requested
• Process payments through your chosen payment integrations
• Improve our products based on usage patterns
• Provide customer support
• Communicate important service updates

We do not use your data for advertising purposes, and we do not sell, rent, or share your personal information with third parties for their marketing purposes.

Legal Basis for Processing

Under GDPR and similar data protection laws, we must have a legal basis for processing your personal data. We rely on the following grounds:

Where we rely on legitimate interest, we have assessed that our interests do not override your fundamental rights and freedoms. You may object to processing based on legitimate interest by contacting us at privacy@looped.sh.

Data Storage and Security

This is how we protect your data today:

• Traffic between your browser and Looped is encrypted with TLS
• We encrypt the most sensitive fields in the application, before they reach the database, with AES-256-GCM: bank account numbers (your company’s and your employees’), employees’ identity, passport and tax numbers, dates of birth and home addresses, OAuth tokens and payment integration keys, payroll files imported from another system
• Encryption keys are kept in a separate secrets manager, apart from the database and its backups
• The apps connect to the database with their own logins, and none of them connect as the database superuser
• Each company's records are separated from every other company's, and Looped checks your role in the company before it shows or changes anything
• Payroll keeps an audit log of changes to employee records and can require a second person to approve a pay run

We use trusted infrastructure providers with strong security practices and compliance certifications. However, no method of transmission over the Internet or electronic storage is 100% secure. While we strive to protect your personal data, we cannot guarantee absolute security.

Data Retention

We retain your data for as long as your account is active or as needed to provide you services.

When you delete your account:

• All personal data, time entries, projects, and invoices are permanently deleted within 30 days
• Calendar integration tokens are immediately deleted when you disconnect your calendar
• Some anonymized usage data may be retained for analytics purposes
• We may retain certain records for legal compliance (e.g., tax records) as required by law, typically for 5-7 years

Payroll records. Payroll records belong to the employer's company and stay with it while the company uses Looped. Employers must keep payroll records for as long as the law requires (in South Africa, generally five years from the last return that includes them), so please export what you need before you close a company. When an employer removes an employee, the employee's access to My pay ends, so we suggest employees download their payslips and tax certificates before they leave.

Third-Party Services and Subprocessors

We use carefully selected third-party services to operate Looped. These subprocessors may have access to your personal data only to perform specific tasks on our behalf and are obligated to protect your data:

Data Flow Clarification

Google and Microsoft integrations: These are inbound integrations only. We receive data from these services (such as calendar events) when you authorise the connection. We do not send your Looped data to Google or Microsoft.

AI providers: When you use AI-powered features in Looped, we send certain data to our AI providers (such as OpenAI or Anthropic) for processing. This may include:

• Calendar event titles (for smart time entry suggestions)
• Task names and descriptions
• Time entry data
• Bank statement line descriptions and amounts
• Your messages to the assistant and the records it reads to answer them

These providers process this data to provide AI features and do not use data received via their APIs to train their models. You can choose not to use AI-powered features if you prefer not to have this data processed by AI providers.

Each of these services has their own privacy policy and security practices. We only share the minimum necessary data with these services to provide functionality. We are not responsible for the privacy practices of third-party services, and we encourage you to review their privacy policies.

International Data Transfers

Looped is operated from South Africa, and the servers that store your data are in Finland, in the European Union. Some of our service providers process data in the United States, as listed above. This means personal information about people in South Africa, including employees in Payroll, is transferred outside South Africa. We use reputable service providers with strong security practices to protect your data.

Your Rights

Depending on your location, you may have the following rights regarding your personal data:

• Access: Request a copy of all personal data we hold about you
• Rectification: Update or correct your information at any time through your account settings
• Erasure: Request deletion of your personal data (subject to legal retention requirements)
• Portability: Export your data in machine-readable formats
• Restriction: Request that we limit processing of your data in certain circumstances
• Object: Object to processing based on legitimate interest
• Withdraw consent: Where processing is based on consent, withdraw it at any time (this does not affect prior lawful processing)
• Disconnect integrations: Remove calendar or payment integrations at any time
• Employees: If your employer runs payroll in Looped, you can see your payslips and tax certificates in My pay. For corrections or other requests, contact your employer, who controls that data
• Opt-out: Unsubscribe from marketing communications (essential service communications will continue)

To exercise any of these rights, contact us at privacy@looped.sh. We will respond within 30 days (or sooner if required by applicable law). We may need to verify your identity before processing your request.

Right to Lodge a Complaint

If you believe we are processing your personal data in violation of applicable law, you have the right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority:

South Africa: Information Regulator: www.inforegulator.org.za

Children's Privacy

Looped is not intended for use by anyone under the age of 16. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children. If you believe we have inadvertently collected information from a child, please contact us immediately at privacy@looped.sh and we will take steps to delete such information.

Changes to This Policy

We may update this privacy policy from time to time to reflect changes in our practices, technology, legal requirements, or for other operational reasons.

When we make significant changes, we will notify you via email or through a prominent notice in the application at least 30 days before the changes take effect. Your continued use of Looped after such notification constitutes acceptance of the updated policy.

We encourage you to review this policy periodically. The "Last updated" date at the top of this page indicates when this policy was last revised.

Contact Us

If you have questions, concerns, or requests regarding this privacy policy or how we handle your data, please contact us:

We aim to respond to all privacy-related enquiries within 5 business days.

Compliance

Looped is committed to complying with applicable data protection laws, including South Africa's Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA).