Privacy policy

The short version

Your income, expenses, debts and notes are stored on your device and are not transmitted to anyone. The app has no analytics. We run one small server, and it holds your account and nothing else: your email address, your name if you gave one, a hash of your password (never the password itself) and the sign-in token that keeps you signed in. Your budget records never reach it. The only data that reaches Google is the account you sign in with and a subscription receipt if you buy Premium. If you set up a shared family budget, the records of that budget travel to our own server and are kept there; the code of your household is the key to them, and the server keeps only a hash of that code, a value that cannot be turned back into the code. Your backup never reaches us either: the app writes a file and you decide where it goes.

There is one exception, and it only applies to the free tier. The free tier is permanent. It is not a countdown, and on it the app shows you advertising from Google AdMob: a banner at the bottom of the home screen, and a full-screen ad now and then. Premium users and users inside their trial never see an ad. Your budget records are never sent to an advertiser and are never used to target ads; see Advertising below.

What the app stores on your device

These records live in the app’s private storage. Uninstalling the app removes them. On the mobile app you can also erase them at any time with Settings → Data → Delete all data.

• Income sources, expense templates and debts, with their amounts and currencies.
• Monthly plans and entries, including which ones are paid and any note you write.
• Your preferences: currency, theme, accent colour, list density, language and reminder timing.
• An optional app lock (PIN or biometrics) and the key that protects it.

Google sign-in

The app can be used with a Google account so that your sign-in works on a new device. When you sign in, Google gives the app your name, your email address and your profile picture, and the app stores only what it needs to show your account and to keep you signed in. It never reads your Gmail, your files, your contacts or your location.

You can remove the app’s access to your account at any time in your Google account security settings.

Your account on our server

You can use Finanz with a Google account alone. Then we hold nothing at all. If you would rather not use Google, the app also offers an account of your own: an email address and a password. That account lives on a server we run, and it is the only thing on that server that belongs to you.

What the server keeps: your email address, the name you typed if you typed one, a hash of your password (never the password itself), and the sign-in token of your session so that you stay signed in. A hash is a one-way value: the server cannot turn it back into your password, and a copy of everything the server holds would not let anyone log in as you.

What the server does not keep: your income, your expenses, your debts, your notes, your categories, your budget, your PIN. Those live on your device only. The server never sees a budget record, not even to work out a total for you.

Where it runs: on a small server in the European Union, operated by SEDO Apps. The connection is encrypted with TLS, so your sign-in data does not travel in the clear.

How long we keep it: until you delete it. You can delete your account at any time in the app, under Settings → Email account → Delete account. That removes the account, its sessions and the budget on that device in one step, and it cannot be undone. If you only sign out, the account stays and you can sign in again with the same address.

If you would rather not use the email account at all, you do not have to: Google sign-in works on its own, and the app is fully usable without any account of ours.

Your backup (optional)

Your records never leave the device on their own. If you want a copy, the app writes a backup file and you choose where it goes: the Google Drive app on your phone, OneDrive, a NAS, a USB stick, or an e-mail to yourself. The app does not upload it, does not see which service you picked, and asks for no permission to do it.

The encrypted backup is the one we recommend. It is encrypted with a passphrase that you type and that the app never stores, so nobody, including us, can read it without that passphrase. Keep it where you keep the things that matter; you will need the passphrase to restore it, so keep that somewhere safe too. The plain JSON export is there if you would rather read the file yourself.

A backup file counts against the storage of whatever you put it in, the same as any other file, and deleting it there deletes the backup. The app cannot restore a file that is gone, so keep the one you made.

Shared family budget (optional)

Starting a shared family budget is a Premium feature. Once you are a member of a pool, the pool keeps working for you even if the membership ends later. A shared budget that stops syncing would be worse than the feature is worth.

If you set up a shared family budget, the records of that budget travel to a small server of our own, in the European Union. Every record is kept there on its own: an income source, a fixed expense, a debt, a month, a line, a note, so the server can keep them apart and hand back exactly what changed. The app asks Google for no extra permission for this, and it never reaches your files.

The household is opened with a code: a short text like XXXX-XXXX that you give to the people of your family. The server keeps only the hash of that code, not the code itself, so a copy of everything it holds does not hand out your family budget. The code is the key of the household: whoever holds it can read and write the shared budget, and nobody else can.

Each member writes their own records, so two of you can work on the same budget at the same time without one overwriting the other. When you sync, the app compares the versions and keeps the newer one; if both of you wrote at the same moment, the app breaks the tie the same way on both phones, so both phones end up with the same budget.

A month can carry a note from each member, and every note says who wrote it. The other member’s note is read-only for you: you can read it, and only the member who wrote it can change or delete it. The app recognises who wrote a note by a label it makes from that member’s account, never by the email address, which never enters the family.

The member who wrote a note can hand it over to the shared budget, for example a shopping list written for the other member. A note that was handed over can then be changed by either member, and it still says who wrote it. Only the author can hand a note over or take it back.

The members of the family are the people you name. They are listed in the family screen in the app, and every member can see the records of the shared budget. The list of members holds the name of each member and that label: no email address of a member of the family ever reaches the household. You can remove a member at any time; after that the app stops writing for them. Leaving a family stops the sharing as well. The records of the household stay on our server as long as the household exists, so keep your own backup if the records matter to you.

Payments

The Premium subscription is sold and billed by Google Play. Your payment details never reach Finanz; we only receive confirmation from the Play store that a subscription is active, and we store that fact on your device. You can cancel through your Play Store account.

Advertising (free tier only)

If you are on the free tier, no Premium, and your first-run trial has ended, the app shows you advertising from Google AdMob. The free tier is permanent, so this is where the app is paid for. Premium subscribers and users inside their trial never see an ad, and neither does anyone who has not agreed to ads.

There are two places where an ad can appear. A banner sits at the bottom of the home screen, above the navigation bar. A full-screen interstitial appears now and then, when you come back to the app after a pause: never while you are entering a number, never on top of the action you just finished, and never more than a few times a day. The app counts the ads it has shown and keeps the full-screen one rare on purpose, because an app that gets in the way is an app people delete.

Before any ad is served, the app asks Google for consent through the User Messaging Platform. In the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom and Switzerland the choice is yours: you can accept, decline or let the ads stay limited to what they do not need to personalise. You can change that choice at any time in Settings → Privacy → Ad privacy in the app. Only a user on the free tier is asked, and only once. A Premium subscriber and a user inside the trial are never shown an ad, so they are never asked about them either. If you change your answer, the app reads it again right away.

Google may read the device’s advertising identifier so that it can serve and measure ads. The app itself never gives your budget records, your notes, your debts or your file names to an advertiser, and it never uses them to pick which ad you see. Your financial records stay on your device.

Ads come from Google and from the advertisers Google works with. Clicking an ad takes you to a site that is not ours and that has its own privacy policy. We do not see which ads you click or which sites you visit afterwards.

What we do not do

• No analytics, no telemetry, no crash reporting to a third party.
• No advertising in Premium, and no advertising to anyone who has not agreed to it.
• No advertising built from your budget: your income, expenses, debts and notes are never shared with an advertiser and never used to target ads.
• No selling or sharing of your data. We do not pass it to anyone, and the one server we run is our own, with no third party behind it.
• No reading of your files, photos, contacts, location or browsing history. The app reads no file of yours at all: the backup is a file you give it, and the shared family budget travels to our own server.

Children

Finanz is a budgeting tool for adults. It is not directed at children and it does not knowingly collect information from them.

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes, the app will show the new version and the date above will change. The policy is kept with the app’s source code, so its history is public.

Contact

This app is published by SEDO Apps, a sole trader (Einzelunternehmer) operated by Sema Doğan in Germany. Questions about this policy, or a request to delete data we hold (we hold none of your finances, but we do hold the address of an account you created with us), go to info@sedoapps.de.