Our approach
LineLedger holds your books — financial records, contacts, payroll, and tax information — so we treat security as a core part of the product, not an afterthought. This page describes the measures we take to protect the hosted Service at books.lineledger.ca. We aim to describe our posture honestly; where we are still building toward something, we say so.
Data residency — your data stays in Canada
Your accounting data is hosted in Canada (Ontario), and our encrypted backups are stored in Canada (the AWS Canada Central region). Some supporting providers — for example our payments processor and content-delivery network — operate globally and may process limited operational data outside Canada; these are listed on our Sub-processors page.
Encryption
- In transit: all connections to the Service are encrypted with TLS (HTTPS). Traffic is fronted by a content-delivery and security network that also helps absorb denial-of-service attacks.
- At rest: backups are encrypted, and our infrastructure providers encrypt stored data at rest.
Authentication and access control
- We support passkeys (WebAuthn) and two-factor authentication for your account, and we encourage you to enable them.
- Passwords are stored only as salted hashes — never in plain text.
- Within a company, access is role-based: owners and admins control what each team member can see and do, down to the section level.
- Internally, staff access to production systems and customer data follows the principle of least privilege and is limited to what is needed to operate and support the Service.
A tamper-evident audit trail
Every change to your accounting records is written to an append-only audit log, with each entry cryptographically chained to the one before it (a hash chain). This makes the record tamper-evident: after-the-fact alterations are detectable. Posted accounting entries are immutable by design.
Payments
Card payments — both for your subscription and for your customers paying you through the customer portal — are handled by Stripe, a PCI-DSS Level 1 certified provider. LineLedger does not store full card numbers.
Backups and resilience
We take regular, encrypted backups so your data can be recovered. You can also export a complete, portable copy of any company’s data from within the Service at any time, so you are never locked in.
Compliance posture
We are transparent about where we stand:
- LineLedger is not currently SOC 2 certified. We design our controls to align with the SOC 2 Trust Services Criteria and industry best practice, and we will update this page as our formal compliance program matures.
- Card data is handled by Stripe (PCI-DSS Level 1), so cardholder data does not touch our servers.
- Our handling of personal information is described in our Privacy Policy, and business customers can request our Data Processing Addendum.
If you are evaluating LineLedger and need more detail on our security practices for a vendor review, email us at [email protected].
Transparency through open source
The LineLedger application is open source under the AGPLv3. Anyone can read the exact code that runs the Service, review how it handles data, and report concerns. We consider this openness a security feature: more eyes on the code means issues are easier to find and fix.
Reporting a vulnerability
We welcome responsible disclosure and are grateful to researchers who help keep LineLedger safe. Please do not report security issues through public GitHub issues or social media. Instead:
- Use GitHub’s private vulnerability reporting on our repository, or
- Email [email protected].
Please include enough detail for us to reproduce and assess the issue. We will acknowledge your report, keep you updated, and let you know when a fix ships. We ask that you give us a reasonable opportunity to address the issue before any public disclosure, and that you avoid accessing or modifying other users’ data while investigating. Full details are in our security policy on GitHub.