Privacy Policy
What Bill-O-Fast collects, why it is held, and what you can ask us to do with it — written against what the software actually does.
Last updated
1. Who this covers
Bill-O-Fast is billing software for retail counters. This policy explains what the service collects, why, and what happens to it. It applies to two different people, and the difference matters:
- Shop owners — you sign up, you hold an account, and the data your shop enters is yours.
- Your customers — a person whose name and phone number a shop types into a bill. That data belongs to the shop that entered it. We hold it on the shop’s behalf and act on the shop’s instructions; a customer asking about their own record should ask the shop they bought from.
2. What we collect
From a shop owner, at signup and in Settings
- Shop name, owner name, email address and phone number.
- A password, stored only as a bcrypt hash. The password itself is never written down and cannot be read back — not by us either.
- If you sign in with Google: the Google account id, and the name and email Google returns. We never receive your Google password.
- Optional shop details used to print an invoice — address, GSTIN, and a logo image you upload.
- Your business category, which decides which fields the app shows you.
Entered by a shop, in the course of trading
- Products: name, price, stock count, barcode and category-specific details.
- Bills: the items sold, quantities, prices, tax, total, bill number, timestamp, and the customer name and phone number the bill is made out to.
Collected automatically
- Standard server logs kept by our hosting providers — IP address, timestamp, requested URL, browser user-agent — used for security and to diagnose faults.
- Aggregate page-view analytics, where enabled on this deployment. See section 7.
We do not collect payment card details, bank details, or location data. The app carries no advertising and no advertising trackers.
3. Why we hold it
- To run your account — signing you in, keeping your session, letting an administrator approve your shop, and emailing you a sign-in code or a password reset link.
- To provide the service — storing your stock, producing invoices, and keeping the sales history you look at in Analytics.
- To deliver receipts — sending a customer their invoice on WhatsApp, where your shop has set that up.
- To keep accounts safe — rate-limiting sign-in attempts and running a bot check on public forms.
4. Who else sees it
We do not sell data and we do not share it with advertisers. Data reaches these providers only because the service cannot work without them:
- MongoDB Atlas — the database everything is stored in.
- Render and Vercel — hosting for the API and the web app. They see request logs.
- Meta (WhatsApp Cloud API) — receives a customer’s phone number and their invoice, but only for shops that have configured WhatsApp delivery, and only for the bills being sent. Shops that have not set it up send nothing to Meta.
- An email provider (SMTP) — receives your email address to deliver sign-in codes and password resets.
- Google — only if you use the Google sign-in button.
- Cloudflare Turnstile — a bot check on public forms, designed not to track people across sites.
We will also disclose data where the law requires it, and to protect the service against abuse or fraud.
Between shops, nothing is shared at all. Every product, bill and customer record is tied to the store that created it, and the server re-checks that ownership on each request. One shop cannot read another’s data.
5. WhatsApp messages and consent
Where WhatsApp delivery is switched on, a customer whose number is on a bill can receive two messages, and only these two:
- Their invoice — the same PDF bill they would be handed at the counter, attached to one message, sent once per bill.
- A short welcome and thank-you note — plain text, no attachment, sent once when a phone number is billed for the first time. A shop can have it follow every bill instead, or switch it off entirely.
That is the complete list. This software sends no marketing, no offers and no bulk messages, and a number entered on a bill is never used for anything beyond the bill it was entered on.
Who the message comes from
Messages are sent from Bill-O-Fast’s own WhatsApp Business number, on behalf of the shop that issued the bill — not from the shop’s own number. A customer therefore sees “Bill-O-Fast Receipts” as the sender, with the shop’s name inside the message and on the invoice attached to it. Replies go to that number’s inbox rather than to the shop, and the app does not act on them: anything a customer needs to settle about a purchase should be taken up with the shop directly.
Consent is the shop’s to obtain
WhatsApp’s own rules require a person to have agreed to be contacted before a business messages them. Asking for a phone number at the counter in order to send that customer their own receipt is the intended use — but the shop still has to say so at the moment it asks, and a line printed on the bill or a sign at the till is enough. The shop is the one that collected the number, so obtaining that agreement is the shop’s responsibility even though we operate the number the message leaves from.
Reusing those numbers for promotions, festival greetings or anything else the customer did not ask for needs separate, explicit consent. It is also the quickest way to be blocked by customers and then restricted by Meta, which stops receipts reaching anyone at all.
How a customer stops the messages
- Tell the shop, which can leave the number off future bills.
- Block the sending number in WhatsApp, which stops delivery outright.
- Report the number to Meta from inside WhatsApp.
None of this is required for a customer to get their bill: a shop with WhatsApp switched off still prints or hands over an invoice exactly as before, and nothing about that customer reaches Meta.
6. Where it is kept, and for how long
Data is held in a managed MongoDB database. Traffic between your browser, our API and the database is encrypted in transit. Passwords are hashed with bcrypt and never stored in a recoverable form.
- Your account and shop data are kept while your account is open.
- Bills are kept as your sales record. An invoice is never rewritten after it is issued — a bill snapshots the item names, prices and details as they were at the moment of sale, so a receipt a customer already holds stays true.
- Server logs are kept for a short period by the hosting providers under their own retention policies.
- On closure, ask us to delete your shop and we will remove your account and its records, except anything we are required to retain by law.
8. Your rights
As a shop owner you can, at any time:
- See and correct your shop’s details in Settings.
- Ask for a copy of the data held about your shop.
- Ask for your account and its data to be deleted.
- Ask for WhatsApp delivery to be switched off for your shop. It runs on credentials held in the server’s configuration rather than in your account, so Settings reports whether it is connected but cannot turn it off for you.
If one of your customers asks you to delete their record, that is your call to make as the shop that collected it — and we will help you carry it out.
9. Children
Bill-O-Fast is a tool for running a business and is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect data from anyone under 18.
10. Changes to this policy
If this policy changes in a way that affects you, the date at the top of this page changes with it and we will tell account holders by email. Continuing to use the service after a change means you accept the updated policy.
11. Contact
Questions about this policy, or a request about your data, can be sent by replying to any email you have received from us.
See also our Terms and Conditions.