Terms of Service

Kelpie (getkelpie.com.au and the Kelpie application) is operated from Australia by Bower Software Pty Ltd (ACN 702 077 254) (“Kelpie”, “we”, “us”). These terms, together with the Privacy Policy, are a binding agreement between Bower Software Pty Ltd and you.

You accept them by creating an account, by accepting an invitation to someone else’s books, or by using Kelpie in any way. If you are using Kelpie for a company, partnership, trust or another person’s business, you confirm that you are authorised to bind that business, and “you” includes it.

Kelpie is bookkeeping software for Australian sole traders and small businesses. You must be at least 18 years old and using Kelpie for a business or other commercial purpose. It is not a consumer finance app and it is not offered to people acting purely as consumers.

Account means your login. Business means one set of books kept in Kelpie; one Account can hold several. Member means a person you invite to a Business as an owner, editor or viewer. Your Data means everything you and your Members enter or upload — including files, and including information about other people such as your customers, suppliers and the people you support. Service means Kelpie, its website, application, assistant and emails. Fees means the subscription price shown when you sign up.

Kelpie is bookkeeping software: a double-entry ledger with invoicing, quotes, bills, bank statement imports, AI categorisation and reconciliation, receipt and document reading, a Shoebox for documents, a logbook, a timesheet, support-work invoicing, reports, and tax-time figures such as GST, BAS and PAYG summaries and the taxable payments report. It is a tool that works under your direction, on the records you give it.

Kelpie is not a registered tax agent, BAS agent, accountant, auditor or financial adviser, and nothing it produces is tax, legal or financial advice. Kelpie prepares your figures; you (or your registered agent) review them and lodge. Every figure Kelpie shows — a tax set-aside, a BAS summary, a profit figure, a report — is built from the records you have given it and the settings you have chosen, and is only as right as they are. Checking those figures, and getting professional advice where your situation calls for it, is yours to do. Kelpie does not lodge anything with the Australian Taxation Office or any other body, and does not act as your agent.

Kelpie is not a bank, a payment service or a payroll system. It never holds, moves or receives money for you. It does not connect to your bank: statements come in as files you choose to upload. Where Kelpie prepares a payment file for your bank, you upload and approve that file at your bank yourself. Kelpie does not run payroll, single touch payroll or superannuation.

You remain the keeper of your business records and responsible for your own lodgements, payments and decisions. Australian law generally requires a business to keep its records for five years; Kelpie helps you keep them, and you can export them at any time.

Kelpie is AI-native. Its AI categorises transactions, reads statement files, receipts, bills and documents, drafts invoices, quotes and bills, reads an invoice you sent into a record of the person it was for, and answers questions about your books through the built-in assistant.

AI output can be wrong. It can misread a figure, pick the wrong category, or misunderstand a question. That is why Kelpie is built so that nothing the AI suggests enters your books without your confirmation: suggestions are drafts, low-confidence suggestions are flagged rather than guessed, and every posting to the ledger is your own approval. The assistant can prepare a draft invoice, quote or bill, or add a customer, only when you have asked it to in that conversation; it never issues, sends, pays, voids, categorises, reconciles or lodges anything, and it never changes a record that is already in your books. You are responsible for reviewing what you confirm — the books are yours, and so are the lodgements and decisions made from them.

The assistant is an AI and says so. It can hand a conversation to a person on our team, and you can ask for a person at any time. What it says about tax law is general information drawn from published sources, not advice about your situation.

AI processing is a core part of the Service and cannot be switched off; you control what you enter and what you drop in. How that processing works, and what our AI provider may and may not do with it, is set out in the Privacy Policy.

Give us accurate details and keep them current. Keep your password and any sign-in link private: you are responsible for everything done under your Account and by your Members, and you must tell us at help@getkelpie.com.au straight away if you think someone else has access. One person, one Account; an Account is for the person who created it and is not to be shared or resold. A subscription covers every Business on your Account, up to 10 — that ceiling is a safeguard against one login being passed around, and if you have an honest need for more, ask us.

You own your records. Your Data belongs to you. You give us a limited, non-exclusive licence to store, process, back up, transmit and display Your Data — including sending it to the providers named in the Privacy Policy — solely to provide, secure and support the Service for you and to meet our legal obligations. Nothing more. We never sell Your Data, never use it for advertising, and never use it to train models that serve other customers without telling you first and changing the Privacy Policy.

Other people’s information. Your Data will include information about other people: customers, suppliers, contacts, and — if you do support work — the people you support and those who pay for their support. You are the one who decides to put that information into Kelpie, so you must have the right to do so, must handle it in accordance with the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) and any other law that applies to you, and must keep it accurate. Enter only what an invoice or your records genuinely need. In particular, Kelpie asks you not to enter anyone’s date of birth, diagnosis, health information, plan budgets, tax file number or other sensitive detail that your books do not require; the support-work record is designed to work without them, and notes you write on an invoice should be about the service delivered.

Your responsibilities for Your Data. Keep your own copies of source documents. Export your books regularly and before you close a Business. Check what Kelpie has read from a document before you rely on it. Our database provider’s backups cover the database — your books — and not the files attached to them, which are stored separately; neither is a substitute for your own copies.

You can invite other people to a Business as an owner (everything, including settings, bank details, billing and inviting others), an editor (the day-to-day books) or a viewer (read-only — the role for your accountant). Each Member signs in with their own Account and accepts these terms for themselves. What a Member can see and do is set by the role you gave them, and you can change or remove it at any time. You are responsible for choosing your Members and for what they do in your books; a Member is responsible for their own conduct.

When you email an invoice, a quote or a payment reminder from Kelpie, it goes from Kelpie’s sending address with your email address as the reply-to, carrying your business name and the document you approved. You are the sender in every sense that matters: you are responsible for the content, for having the right to email the recipient, and for keeping the recipient’s details correct. Automatic reminders go out on the schedule you set and stop when you turn them off or the invoice is paid. Kelpie must not be used to send bulk, unsolicited or misleading messages.

Kelpie also emails you: things that are part of running the Service (sign-in and password emails, billing receipts, notices about your account, security and these terms), and optional ones you can turn off in Settings (the monthly reminder, ATO due dates, the weekly note, invoice-chasing notices). We do not send marketing on behalf of anyone else.

You can drop a bank statement, a bill, a receipt, a document for the Shoebox, or an invoice you sent into Kelpie, and its AI reads it. Upload only files you are entitled to use. Each Business can have up to one hundred documents read a day; a file may be refused if it is too large, not a format Kelpie reads, or not what it appears to be. What Kelpie reads from a document is a draft for you to check — figures, dates, names and item numbers can be misread, and a document Kelpie could not read is said to be unread rather than guessed at.

Kelpie can build a payment file (ABA format) for bills you choose to pay, from the supplier bank details you have entered and your own account details as the remitter. Kelpie never sends that file to a bank and never moves money: you download it, upload it to your own banking, and approve the payments there. Check every supplier’s BSB and account number against a source you trust before you pay — invoices with altered bank details are a common fraud, and a file built from details you entered and approved is your instruction, not ours.

The price. Kelpie has two plans, in Australian dollars, as shown when you sign up. Kelpie Full costs $25 a month, with everything included and no usage caps. Kelpie Support costs $10 a month and covers support invoices, the people you support and their progress notes, invoicing and getting paid, receipts and kilometres, with Kelpie reading up to 30 documents a month for you; bank statements, bills, pay runs, reports and journals are on Kelpie Full. Every Business on your Account is on the one subscription and its plan. While your subscription remains continuously active, the monthly price of the plan you are on will not increase. If we ever change a plan’s price for new customers, yours stays where it was. A subscription is continuously active from the day you subscribe until you cancel it, or until it ends because a payment could not be collected after Stripe’s retries; subscribing again after that is a new subscription, at the price shown then.

Changing plan. You can move between the two plans at any time from Billing. Moving to Kelpie Full is charged when you move, for the rest of the current billing period, pro rata; moving to Kelpie Support is credited against your next bill, pro rata. After a move you pay the price shown for that plan when you moved. Moving plans never changes or removes Your Data: on Kelpie Support, the parts of Kelpie that are on Kelpie Full stop taking new work, and everything already in your books stays exactly as it is.

Paying. Subscriptions are billed monthly in advance by card through Stripe, our payment provider. You give Stripe your card; we never see or store card numbers. By subscribing you authorise the monthly charge until you cancel. If a payment fails, Stripe retries it over about two weeks and we tell you in the app; you keep access during that time. If it still cannot be collected, the subscription ends and the Service is paused for that Account.

Cancelling. You can cancel at any time from Billing. Cancellation takes effect at the end of the period you have paid for; there are no refunds for the remainder of a period, except where the Australian Consumer Law or another law requires one, or where we have failed to provide the Service and cannot fix it within a reasonable time. Cancelling stops the billing, not your books: everything you have entered stays, and you can subscribe again to get back in. If you want your books without subscribing again, ask us at help@getkelpie.com.au and we will provide an export.

Free access. If we ever offer a free trial, a beta or complimentary access, it is provided as-is, may change as the product develops, and we will tell you before free access becomes paid.

Use Kelpie lawfully, for bookkeeping, for businesses you are entitled to act for. Don’t attempt to break, probe, overload, scrape or reverse-engineer the Service; access or attempt to access anyone else’s data; resell or share access; use the Service to send spam or anything misleading; upload malware or unlawful material; use the AI features to generate content unrelated to your books or in a way that is abusive or harmful; or use Kelpie in breach of any law, including privacy, tax and anti-money-laundering law. We may suspend an Account that is being used to attack the Service, other users or third parties — with notice, except where the threat makes that impracticable.

We work to keep Kelpie available and your data safe, with encrypted storage, access enforced at the database layer and database backups. No online service can promise perfect uptime: there will be maintenance, updates and the occasional outage, and our providers have theirs. Kelpie is under active development — features will improve and occasionally change or be retired, and we will not remove your ability to export your books.

Support is by the in-app assistant and by email at help@getkelpie.com.au. A person answers in business hours, Sydney time. We do not offer a service-level agreement or guaranteed response times.

We may change these terms. For a change that is material and would disadvantage you, we will give you at least 30 days’ notice by email or in the app before it takes effect, and you can cancel before then if you don’t accept it. Other changes take effect when posted with a new date at the top. Continuing to use Kelpie after a change means the updated terms apply.

Kelpie runs on established providers: Supabase (database, authentication and file storage), Vercel (hosting), Anthropic (AI), Resend (email delivery) and Stripe (payments). Each processes data only to provide its service to us, under its own commercial terms and security commitments. Their terms bind us, not you; your agreement is with us. We are responsible for choosing and managing them, and we are not liable for their outages or failures beyond what the law requires of us.

The Kelpie software, brand, design, documentation and content belong to us and our licensors; you get the right to use them as part of the Service, and nothing else. Your records, your invoice designs, your templates and your documents belong to you. If you give us feedback or suggestions, we may use them without obligation, and you agree that doing so does not give you any right in Kelpie. Neither of us gets any rights in the other’s property beyond what these terms say.

Nothing in these terms excludes, restricts or modifies rights you have under the Australian Consumer Law or any other law that cannot be excluded. Where the law allows a supplier of services to limit its liability, our liability for a failure to comply with a consumer guarantee is limited, at our option, to supplying the service again or paying the cost of having it supplied again.

To the extent the law permits: our total liability to you under or in connection with these terms, in contract, tort (including negligence) or otherwise, is capped at the greater of the Fees you paid us in the 12 months before the claim and AU$100; and neither of us is liable to the other for indirect or consequential loss, loss of profit, revenue or business opportunity, or loss of data that you could have exported or backed up.

Some things are yours by the nature of the Service, and we are not liable for them: lodgements, payments and decisions made on records and figures you reviewed and approved; the consequences of a payment file you uploaded to your bank; AI suggestions you confirmed without checking; losses caused by someone using your password or a Member’s access; and losses caused by information you or your Members entered wrongly, or were not entitled to enter.

You agree to compensate us for loss we suffer because of a claim by a third party that arises from your breach of these terms, from Your Data infringing someone’s rights, or from information about other people that you entered without the right to — in each case to the extent the loss was caused by you and not by us.

By you. You can close any Business from Businesses. A closed Business disappears from every screen at once and can be restored within seven days; after that its records are erased from the live service and cannot be recovered. Attached files are deleted at the moment you close. Export before you close: Australian law generally requires you to keep your own business records for five years. To delete your Account itself, email help@getkelpie.com.au and we will do it, once every Business on it is closed.

By us. We can end this agreement for a material breach of these terms — with notice and a reasonable chance to fix the problem, except for a breach that cannot be fixed or that puts the Service, other users or third parties at risk. If we ever discontinue Kelpie, we will give you at least 60 days’ notice and the means to export your complete books.

Ending the agreement does not affect fees already due, rights that have already accrued, or the clauses that by their nature continue — including 6 (Your Data), 15 (Intellectual property), 16 (Liability) and 19 (The legal footing).

How we collect, use, protect, share and delete personal information — yours, and the information in your books about other people — is set out in the Privacy Policy, which forms part of these terms.

These terms are governed by the laws of Queensland, Australia, and you and we submit to the non-exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of Queensland and the courts entitled to hear appeals from them. If you have a complaint, tell us first at help@getkelpie.com.au and we will try to resolve it with you within 30 days; nothing here stops you using a court, a tribunal or a regulator.

If part of these terms is found unenforceable, the rest still stands. A delay in enforcing a right is not a waiver of it. We may transfer this agreement to a successor that takes over Kelpie, and will tell you if we do; you may not transfer your Account without our written agreement. Notices to you are sent to the email address on your Account; notices to us go to help@getkelpie.com.au. These terms and the Privacy Policy are the whole agreement between us about Kelpie and replace anything earlier.