Security & Privacy
Your clients' data is sensitive. Here's how MAO protects it — from how we secure the platform to how each app handles your documents.
Authentication & access control
Every account is protected by a password that's stored only as a strong, one-way hash — we never hold your actual password, and it can't be recovered from what we store. Sign-in sessions use encrypted, same-site, HTTP-only cookies (so they can't be read by scripts or sent from another site) and they expire when you log out. Repeated failed logins and password-reset requests are rate-limited to shut down brute-force and guessing attacks.
Access is controlled per account, and every firm is a separate tenant: your team only ever sees your own clients, documents and connections — never another firm's, and never ours. Within a firm, an admin decides who has access and can remove someone at any time.
Infrastructure & data protection
MAO runs on AWS infrastructure in the EU (London) region. All traffic is encrypted in transit with HTTPS (TLS 1.2+) and enforced by HSTS, and the app sends hardened HTTP security headers to defend against common web attacks. Each account's data is logically isolated from every other account's.
Credentials for connected services — such as your Xero sign-in tokens — are stored encrypted, and our own API keys and secrets live in the server's protected environment, never in the code or the browser. The database is backed up daily, so your work is recoverable.
AI in MAO
Some MAO tools use AI to speed up specific, well-defined tasks — for example suggesting how figures map onto the right lines of a set of accounts. Everywhere else, MAO runs on purpose-built, rule-based logic.
To make those suggestions the AI reads the relevant part of your document, so we keep what's sent to the minimum a task needs and focus it on the labels and structure rather than the underlying figures. We use Anthropic's Claude API, which operates under a commercial data-processing agreement and — importantly — does not use the data sent to it to train its models. And if you'd rather not use AI at all, the AI-assisted features can be switched off.
Some apps also connect to Xero, but only with your explicit authorisation and only to pull your own accounting data. You stay in control of every connection.
Document handling — Accounts Roll Forward
When you upload a document to Roll Forward, it is held on our server only while your draft is being prepared, and removed straight afterwards. Nothing is retained once you have your file — no document history, no content logs, nothing.
Document handling — Accounts Checker
Accounts Checker works the same way as Roll Forward. Your uploaded document is processed in a temporary, isolated location on our server, the interactive results are generated and returned to you immediately, and that temporary copy is deleted the moment the request finishes — whether it succeeded or failed. Nothing about your document or its contents is stored anywhere.
Document handling — Accounts Generator
Accounts Generator works a little differently, because its whole purpose is learning how your trial balance maps onto your financial statements — so unlike Roll Forward, it needs to keep a working copy of your data while it does that. Your uploaded trial balance, your Word financial statements, and the mappings you confirm are stored securely against your account, and stay there until you delete the client — there's no automatic expiry, so it's there whenever you come back to it.
MAO learns from the mappings you confirm — in anonymised form, never your figures or client-identifying details — to sharpen its suggestions over time. If you'd like your Accounts Generator data removed at any point, delete the client from within the app, or contact us and we'll do it for you.
Document handling — Assembler & Payment Run
These two apps connect directly to your own Xero account, via Xero's standard sign-in — MAO never sees or stores your Xero password — to pull trial balances, invoices, bank summaries and payroll data on your behalf. The connection itself is encrypted at rest, and only ever accesses the data your Xero authorisation allows.
Payment Run builds your report entirely in memory from a fresh pull each time you run it, and doesn't keep a copy of your invoices, balances or payroll figures afterwards. Only the encrypted Xero connection itself is stored, one per person, so each user in your firm only ever sees their own connected data.
Assembler connects to your Xero account — via Xero's standard sign-in, so MAO never sees your Xero password — to pull trial balances and general-ledger detail, and builds your year-end workpaper as an Excel file on demand. So you can return to a job in progress, Assembler keeps the setup you create against your account: your account-tag mappings, any consolidation and elimination adjustments, and any manual (non-Xero) company figures you enter. That stays until you remove it — delete it in the app, or contact us and we'll clear it for you.
Document handling — Inbox Scooper
Inbox Scooper connects to your accounts-payable mailbox through Microsoft 365 or Google's standard OAuth sign-in — so MAO never sees your email password — and reads only what it needs: the supplier-invoice PDFs arriving in that inbox. It can mark messages as read or file them into a folder, but it never deletes your email.
Invoices are read and sorted on our server. The invoices themselves aren't kept — they're handed back to you as a download, or filed straight into your own connected Dropbox or OneDrive. MAO stores only your mailbox connection, your settings, and a record of which invoices have already been filed (to avoid duplicates), each kept isolated to your own account.
Document handling — Financial Modeller
Financial Modeller keeps your work saved so you can pick up where you left off: the model you build is stored against your account — shared across your firm, or private to you as a solo user — and stays there until you delete it. It runs on our own servers, your figures aren't shared with any third party, and Excel exports are generated on demand and handed straight to you.
Summary
Questions?
If you have specific security requirements or want to discuss a private deployment, email us at hello@getmao.ai.