Privacy notice

Smart Abacus is the data controller for the personal information described in this notice.

For anything to do with your data, email lisa@smartabacus.co.uk.

• Details you send us through the contact form or by email or phone: your name, practice name, location, approximate fee range, contact details, when to call, and anything you choose to tell us.
• Correspondence – emails and notes of calls and meetings with you or your advisers.
• Publicly available business information we use to identify practices that may fit our criteria and contact their owners, such as Companies House records, practice websites and professional directories.
• Anonymous website statistics. We use Plausible Analytics, which doesn’t use cookies and doesn’t collect personal data.

• To respond to your enquiry and take the conversation forward – steps you’ve asked us to take, and our legitimate interest in replying.
• To evaluate a possible acquisition of your practice – our legitimate interest in assessing businesses we may buy, and steps before entering into a contract with you.
• To contact practice owners who may be interested in selling – our legitimate interest in finding practices to buy. Every message tells you how to opt out, and we stop as soon as you ask.
• To meet legal and regulatory obligations, including anti-money laundering checks if a sale goes ahead.

We don’t ask for personal information about your clients or staff at the early stages. If a sale progresses to due diligence, any such information is shared only under a confidentiality agreement and handled under a separate written arrangement.

If an enquiry doesn’t lead anywhere, we delete your details after three years from our last contact. If we buy your practice, we keep deal records for as long as the law requires, usually six years after completion. If you ask us not to contact you again, we keep a minimal record of that request so we don’t.

• Our professional advisers – lawyers, accountants and funders – under a duty of confidentiality or an NDA.
• Service providers who host this website and our email: Netlify (website hosting and contact-form submissions) and Microsoft 365 (email).
• Regulators, law enforcement or the courts, where the law requires it.

We never sell personal data. Some of our providers process data outside the UK, including in the United States; where they do, we rely on UK adequacy regulations or the UK International Data Transfer Addendum to protect it.

Under UK GDPR you can ask for a copy of the information we hold about you, ask us to correct or delete it, object to us using it (including for contacting you), or ask us to restrict how we use it. Email lisa@smartabacus.co.uk and we’ll respond within one month.

If you’re unhappy with how we’ve handled your data, please tell us first. You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office at ico.org.uk or on 0303 123 1113.