Terms of service

1. Software, not advice

QuarterFile is record-keeping and filing software. It helps you keep digital records and submit Making Tax Digital for Income Tax quarterly updates to HMRC. It does not provide tax, legal, accounting or financial advice, and nothing in the product (including suggested categories) is advice. Category suggestions are suggestions only; you confirm every figure before it is filed, and you are responsible for the accuracy of the data you confirm and the returns you file.

2. The service and its HMRC dependency

QuarterFile files updates through HMRC’s APIs. HMRC’s systems are outside our control: outages, maintenance or specification changes on HMRC’s side may delay filing. We surface deadlines and send reminders as a convenience, but you remain legally responsible for meeting your filing obligations and deadlines. We show HMRC service status in the app whenever we detect a problem.

3. Your account

You must provide a valid email address and keep access to it secure, along with your Google account if you sign in that way. Sign-in is passwordless: there is no password to steal, guess or reuse, so that access is what protects your account. You must be 18 or over. You are responsible for activity under your account; tell us immediately at … if you suspect unauthorised access.

4. Your data is yours

You own your records. You can export your transactions as CSV from Settings at any time, free, and every filed receipt stays viewable and printable from your overview. Category suggestions are produced by our AI subprocessor, running in the UK under a data processing agreement; we strip account numbers, sort codes and long reference numbers before a line is sent. We do not train machine-learning models on your data, and that contract does not permit the subprocessor to use it to train theirs. The detail, including who that subprocessor is, is in our privacy policy.

On account closure we delete your data as described in the privacy policy. The one exception is the receipt for each quarter you filed through us: it records the category totals sent, the HMRC reference and the date, and we keep it as evidence of what was filed for six years after the 31 January that closes the tax year it belongs to. The privacy policy sets out that period and why it is that long. Receipts can’t be edited or deleted by anyone, including us, while that hold lasts. They never contain your National Insurance number.

5. Price and payment

QuarterFile Plus is £12.50 per quarter, or £45 per tax year, billed by Stripe. Your first quarter of Plus is free, once per person (verified via your HMRC connection, using a one-way fingerprint so the offer can’t be redeemed twice. See the privacy policy); no card is needed for the free quarter. We are not VAT-registered, so no VAT is added: the price you see is the price you pay. If that ever changes, prices will be shown with VAT already included. Both plans renew automatically(quarterly, or each year on the tax-year plan) until you cancel. Before every renewal, on either plan, we email you at least 14 days ahead with the amount, the date and how to cancel. You may cancel at any time; paid features continue to the end of the paid period, after which your account becomes read-only: you can view everything, export your transactions as CSV, and resume whenever you like. The free plan needs no payment. Prices may change with at least 30 days’ notice; changes never apply retroactively to a period you’ve already paid for.

6. Your right to cancel

If you are a consumer, you have a legal right to cancel a new subscription within 14 days without giving a reason. This is your right under the Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013. The 14 days run from the day the paid contract is made. If you start on the free quarter, no paid contract exists yet and nothing is charged, so this right attaches to your Plus subscription when the payment obligation begins, not to the day you first signed up.

Cancelling in Settings inside those 14 days is enough on its own: we work out the prorated amount, end Plus there and then, and send the refund without you having to ask. If you would rather we did it, send a message through our contact form or email …. Any clear statement that you want to cancel is enough: “I’m cancelling my QuarterFile Plus subscription” does it. What matters is that you tell us before the 14 days are up.

We refund you to the same payment method you paid with, and we never charge a fee for cancelling. Cancelling in Settings sends it immediately; if you tell us some other way, within 14 days of the day we are told.

Plus switches on the moment you subscribe: by subscribing you are asking us to begin supplying the service during the cancellation period. If you then cancel within the 14 days, we may keep a prorated amount for the part of the period you actually had the service for, and refund the rest. We will always tell you that figure before we take it. If you haven’t used any whole day of the period, you get everything back.

This right is in addition to being able to cancel at any time, as described above, and it does not affect your other statutory rights.

7. Acceptable use

Don’t attempt to breach security, access other users’ data, resell the service without our agreement, or use it for unlawful purposes. We may suspend accounts that put the service or other users at risk; if that happens to yours, we’ll tell you why.

8. Liability

We provide the service with reasonable care and skill, as the Consumer Rights Act 2015 requires, and we don’t try to contract out of that. Mistakes that are ours (a calculation we perform, a submission we build, a figure we show you) are our responsibility.

What we are not liable for is the part of the job that is yours: HMRC penalties or interest arising from figures you confirmed that were wrong, deadlines you chose not to meet, or HMRC’s own systems being down. QuarterFile does not check whether your records are complete or true, and does not give tax advice, so it cannot promise that a return is correct.

Subject to the paragraph below, our total liability to you in any 12-month period is capped at the greater of the fees you paid us in that period and £100, so the cap is never zero, including on the free plan.

We are also not liable for loss that was not reasonably foreseeable to both of us when you subscribed, for loss of profit or business opportunity, or for delay or failure caused by events outside our reasonable control (an internet outage, or a failure of HMRC’s systems, are examples).

Nothing in these terms excludes or limits liability that the law does not allow us to exclude or limit: fraud, death or personal injury caused by negligence, and our duty under the Consumer Rights Act 2015 to perform the service with reasonable care and skill (the cap above never reduces our liability for that below the price you paid). Your statutory rights are unaffected.

9. Changes and termination

We may update these terms; material changes are notified by email at least 30 days ahead. You can close your account at any time in Settings. We may terminate with 90 days’ notice.

What “free forever” means, and how long receipts are kept. “Free forever” means we will not put the free plan behind a paywall. Receipts are kept for six years, as set out in section 4 and the privacy policy: for the whole of that period we will not delete them early, put them behind a paywall, or hold them to ransom. We keep them for six years rather than forever because data-protection law does not let us hold your records for longer than we can justify, and six years is past the point at which HMRC or a claim could still ask about the filing. Neither is a promise that QuarterFile will exist indefinitely. If we ever discontinue the service, we will give you at least 90 days’ notice by email, keep export working for the whole of that period, and take no payment for a period you cannot use. Because your records export as CSV and your filing history is also held by HMRC under your own account, discontinuation does not leave you without your data or your filings.

10. Governing law

These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales. If you live in Scotland or Northern Ireland, you can also rely on the law of your home nation and bring proceedings in its courts.