Privacy Policy

Last Updated: September 2026 (version 2026-09-v3)

Welcome to My Budget. This service is operated under the New Zealand Privacy Act 2020 by Sky Bison Code Design ("we," "our," or "us"). We are committed to protecting your personal information and ensuring transparency in how we handle your data. If you have any questions, you can contact us at admin@mybudget.org.nz.

1. Information We Collect (IPP 1-4)

We only collect personal information for the lawful purpose of providing personal budgeting and financial management services. The information we collect includes:

Account Information: Your name, email address, and hashed password.
Financial Data: Budget items, income details, tax codes, KiwiSaver rates, and student loan status.
Credit Records: Credit check records and any uploaded financial documents.
Usage Data: Login history, session data, and security audit logs (including client budget lifecycle records and consent attestations).
Payment Data: Data processed via Stripe for your subscription (we do not store full credit card numbers directly).
AI Processing Data: Documents you choose to scan (such as loan contracts, payslips, and insurance documents) for automated information extraction, and budget summary data sent for automated mathematical analysis and data processing (not for generating financial advice). The Application does not connect to bank accounts, does not ingest bank statement feeds, and we never ask for or store internet banking credentials.
Client Information: where you subscribe and create client budgets, the personal and financial information you enter about other people, together with your recorded attestation that you hold their consent or lawful authority.
Legal Acceptance Records: the version of our Terms, Privacy Policy and Professional Use Addendum you accepted, and the date and time of each acceptance.

2. How We Use Your Information (IPP 10)

We use the information we collect strictly for the following purposes:

To provide, maintain, and support our budgeting services.
To accurately calculate NZ tax obligations, including PAYE, ACC, KiwiSaver, and Student Loan deductions.
To process subscription payments securely via Stripe.
To perform AI-assisted document scanning and information extraction upon your request.
To perform deterministic mathematical analysis of your financial data via AI (e.g., ratio calculations, variance analysis, benchmark comparisons). This does NOT generate personalised financial advice or recommendations.
To generate financial reports, summaries, and data exports.
To ensure account security, prevent fraud, and maintain audit logs.
To send necessary service-related communications and updates.
To operate client budgets and to hold client information on behalf of, and under the instructions of, the subscriber who created that budget.
To record and evidence which version of our Terms, Privacy Policy and Professional Use Addendum you accepted and when, and each per-client consent attestation.
To maintain audit records of security events and client budget activity.
To enforce our Terms and to establish, exercise, or defend legal claims.
To compile anonymised, aggregated, and de-identified statistics from your own account data to improve the Application (this never includes identifiable information and never includes client budget information).

3. Disclosure of Information (IPP 11)

We will never sell your personal information. We only disclose your information in limited circumstances:

Stripe: For secure payment processing.
Floot: For hosting our application and database infrastructure.
AI Services: For document scanning and AI-powered mathematical budget analysis. Data is processed temporarily for analytical computations, is not stored by these third parties, is not used to train their models, and is not used to generate financial advice.
Legal Requirements: If required to do so under New Zealand law, law enforcement, or regulatory authorities.
The Account Holder: Where your information sits in a client budget, it is accessible to the subscriber who created it.
Professional Advisers and Insurers: Where reasonably necessary to obtain legal advice or to establish, exercise, or defend a legal claim, subject to strict confidentiality.

4. Data Storage and Security (IPP 5)

We implement robust security measures to protect your data against unauthorized access or loss:

Data is stored in secure, encrypted databases.
Passwords are strictly hashed using bcrypt and are never stored in plain text.
We enforce HTTPS encryption for all data in transit.
Authentication relies on session-based tokens with automatic expiry and regular cleanup.
We maintain comprehensive audit logging of all security events, client budget activity (including creation, updates, and deletion), and legal acceptance and consent attestations.

5. Your Rights (IPP 6-7)

Under the Privacy Act 2020, you have strong rights over your data. We respond to all requests within 20 working days as required by law:

Right to Access: You can download a complete copy of your data at any time via the Privacy & Security tab in your dashboard.
Right to Correction: You can easily update your personal and financial information directly through the app.
Right to Deletion: You can permanently delete your account and all associated data via your dashboard. Upon deletion, all personal information, budget items, uploaded documents and scanned files, credit check records, and stored files are immediately and permanently removed from both our database and file storage systems. A confirmation email will be sent to your registered email address confirming the deletion of your account and data.

These rights apply to information we hold about you as our user. If your information was entered by a professional using a client budget, see the section below, as your request must be directed to them.

6. Client Budgets and Information About Other People

We recognize two distinct situations regarding personal information in our Application: (a) information about you, which we collect and hold as the agency; and (b) information about someone else that a subscriber (typically a financial mentor, adviser, broker or budget adviser) enters into a "client budget".
For (b): the subscriber who created the client budget is the agency responsible for that information under the Privacy Act 2020. We hold it solely as that subscriber's service provider and agent for storage and processing, and under section 11 of the Privacy Act 2020 it is treated as held by them, not by us. We do not use it for any purpose other than operating, securing and backing up the service for them.
No Anonymised Aggregation or Model Training: Client budget information is never used for anonymised aggregation, benchmarking, product improvement or to train any model — it is used only to operate, secure, support and back up the service for the account holder who created it.
Consent and notification is the subscriber's responsibility: our Terms require every subscriber to warrant that they hold the individual's informed consent or other lawful authority, and to have given the individual the IPP 3 collection notice, before entering their information. We record an attestation to that effect, with a timestamp, against each client budget.
Audit Logging: Activity on client budgets is audit logged (including the creation, update and deletion of a client budget, and each consent attestation, with a timestamp) so both we and the account holder have a reliable record of who did what and when.
Team Access: When a professional account has multiple logins (seats), all invited members of that account have access to all of that account's client budgets. The account holder is solely responsible for deciding who is invited and ensuring they are entitled to view the information under the Privacy Act.
If you are an individual whose information has been entered by a professional: please contact that professional (or their organization) in the first instance, as they hold your information and must respond to access and correction requests within 20 working days. If you contact us and we can identify the relevant record, we will promptly refer your request to the account holder, require them to respond within the statutory timeframe, and give them the tools and assistance needed to give effect to it. We will not disclose the contents of a client budget to anyone other than the account holder (and their invited members) without lawful authority.
Retention and deletion: client budget information is retained only while the account holder chooses to keep it. When they delete a client budget, or delete their account, all of that budget's items, credit check records and uploaded documents are permanently deleted from our database and file storage. The account holder is responsible for deleting information they no longer have a lawful purpose to hold.
AI processing of third-party documents: where a professional uploads a document relating to another person for scanning, the contents are transmitted to a third-party AI processor for automated extraction, processed temporarily, and not retained by that processor or used to train its models. Obtaining consent for that automated processing is the uploading subscriber's responsibility.
Credit Information and the Credit Reporting Privacy Code 2020: The credit check feature is a record-keeping tool only. My Budget is not a credit reporter, credit reporting agency or credit-scoring service, and nothing in the app constitutes a credit report or credit reporting service. Where a subscriber records or uploads credit information about another person, they warrant to us that they obtained it in compliance with the Credit Reporting Privacy Code 2020 with that individual's specific authorisation. We store it solely for the account holder and use it for no other purpose, and it is never used to build a credit score or credit-decisioning product.
Breach notification: if a breach affects client budgets, we will notify the account holder without undue delay and assist them. Because they are the agency with the relationship to the individual, they are responsible for assessing whether it is a notifiable privacy breach (including any misuse by members they invited) and for notifying the Office of the Privacy Commissioner and the affected individuals. We will also notify the Commissioner directly where the breach concerns information we hold as an agency in our own right.

Gift Subscriptions and Information About Other People

When someone buys a gift subscription, they give us the recipient's name and email address, along with their own name and email address.
We collect this information for one purpose only: to deliver the gift. This includes emailing the recipient their gift code and instructions, and emailing the purchaser a confirmation and receipt. This information is never used for marketing and is never sold or shared.
Under Information Privacy Principles 2 and 3 (IPP 2/3), we rely on the purchaser to have the recipient's authority to give us their details; the purchaser warrants this when they buy the gift.
What we store against a gift record: purchaser and recipient names and email addresses, the optional personal message, the duration purchased, the amount paid, the Stripe payment reference, the gift code, and whether and when the gift was claimed. Card details are handled entirely by Stripe and are never stored by us.
The recipient is never asked for card or bank details to claim their gift, and claiming a gift does not create any payment obligation for them.
A recipient who does not want the gift can simply not claim it; the code automatically lapses after 12 months. A recipient can also ask us to delete the gift record holding their email address by emailing us at admin@mybudget.org.nz (though we must keep a minimal record of the transaction where required for financial and tax purposes).
Gift records are retained for as long as needed for accounting and dispute purposes, and are then deleted in line with the data retention section of this policy.

7. Data Retention (IPP 9)

We do not retain your personal information longer than necessary for the purposes for which it was collected:

Account data is retained only while your account remains active.
Security audit logs are retained for as long as your account is active and are deleted together with your account when it is deleted.
When you initiate an account deletion, all personal data — including budget items, uploaded documents, scanned files stored in our secure private file storage, credit check records, audit logs, session data, and AI usage records — is permanently and immediately removed from both our active database systems and our file storage infrastructure. This includes a comprehensive recursive cleanup of all files associated with your account, ensuring no orphaned data remains in any storage system. Following account deletion, your email address is retained in a minimal, standalone record for a maximum period of twelve (12) months solely to prevent account-related confusion (e.g., informing a returning user that their account no longer exists) and to support fraud prevention obligations. This email record is not linked to any other personal data, is not used for marketing or communication purposes, and is automatically and permanently purged after twelve (12) months. A confirmation email is sent to notify you that the deletion has been completed.

8. International Data Transfers

While we are based in New Zealand, some of our service providers operate internationally:

Our hosting infrastructure may process data on servers located outside New Zealand.
We ensure that all third-party processors are bound by agreements that maintain privacy protections equivalent to the New Zealand Privacy Act 2020.
Our payment processor, Stripe, processes payment data in strict accordance with global PCI DSS standards.

9. Cookies and Sessions

We believe in respecting your digital footprint:

We use essential session cookies purely for authentication purposes. We do not use tracking cookies.
Session cookies expire automatically after a period of inactivity.
We employ zero third-party advertising or analytics cookies on our application.

10. Children's Privacy

Our personal budgeting services require the account holder to be at least 18 years of age. We do not knowingly collect personal information directly from children. Where information about a child or dependant appears inside a household or client budget, it was entered by the adult account holder, who is the agency responsible for it and warrants they hold authority to do so (as parent, guardian, or under the Professional Use Addendum). Any requests regarding such information should be directed to that account holder as described in the Client Budgets section.

11. Breach Notification

In the unlikely event of a privacy breach that poses a risk of serious harm, we are committed to acting swiftly. We will notify the New Zealand Privacy Commissioner and affected users without undue delay, in full compliance with Part 6 of the Privacy Act 2020. If a breach affects client budgets, please see the Client Budgets section for how this is handled.

12. Changes to This Policy

We may periodically update this Privacy Policy to reflect changes in our practices or the law. We will actively notify users of any material changes via email or an in-app alert. The "Last Updated" date at the top of this page will always reflect the most recent revisions.

13. Contact & Complaints

If you have any questions, concerns, or wish to make a complaint about how we handle your personal information:

Contact Us: Email our Privacy Officer at admin@mybudget.org.nz. We will acknowledge and work to resolve your complaint within 20 working days.
Office of the Privacy Commissioner: If you are not satisfied with our response, you have the right to complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner. You can find more information at https://www.privacy.org.nz.
Client Budgets: If your information was entered into My Budget by a professional, we may need to refer your complaint to that account holder because they, not we, are the agency responsible for it.