Global Office: Sync

Security

Security that does something

Global Office: Sync handles financial records, tax IDs, bank activity and the documents behind them. That information needs more than a reassuring badge and a vague promise that we take security seriously.

Here is what Global Office: Sync actually does.

Bank connections

Sync never receives your bank password

Bank connections are handled through Plaid. You connect through Plaid's secure process, and your bank username and password never enter Global Office: Sync.

Sync receives the permission needed to read the accounts you choose. It cannot move money, make payments or change anything at your bank.

The access token Plaid issues for your connection is encrypted with its own key, separate from the keys that protect tax IDs and accounting software logins, and that key is not stored in the database.

Documents

Your documents are private

Receipts, invoices, tax forms, insurance certificates and other uploaded files are stored privately. They do not have permanent public addresses.

When Global Office: Sync needs to show you a document, it creates a temporary link for that specific file. The link stops working within 12 hours, or sooner when you sign out.

Documents are never attached to notification emails. Those emails also avoid client names, dollar amounts and file names.

Sharing with a bookkeeper

You decide what gets shared

Connecting a business to a bookkeeper does not simply open the doors to everything.

The business owner chooses:

  • How far back shared records go
  • Whether tax documents are included
  • Whether insurance certificates are included
  • Whether connected bank activity is visible

Either side can end the connection. If bank sharing is turned off, the bookkeeper loses access on the next request.

Global Office: Sync does not trust the browser to decide who should see a record. That decision is made by the server every time information is requested.

Disconnecting

Bank access can be ended completely

Disconnecting a bank does more than hide it from the screen.

Global Office: Sync tells Plaid to end the connection, removes the stored access information, deletes the imported bank transactions, and the bookkeeper can no longer see any of that bank's accounts or transactions.

When you disconnect a bank, Global Office: Sync immediately stops using and sharing that connection. It asks Plaid to end the connection and, if Plaid doesn't confirm, Sync keeps trying until it does.

Tax IDs and passwords

Sensitive information gets additional protection

Social Security numbers and Employer Identification Numbers are encrypted before they are saved, whether they come from a W-9 or from a 1099 you receive. The database refuses to store one that has not been encrypted.

Connections to QuickBooks, Xero and FreshBooks are also encrypted. The Plaid access token Sync uses to read connected accounts is encrypted with its own key.

Passwords are never stored in readable form. They are protected using a slow, one-way process designed specifically for passwords. There is no button anyone at Sync can press to reveal your password.

The audit trail

Every change leaves a trail

When you file a scanned document, the audit trail keeps what Global Office: Sync read beside what you approved.

Every later correction records:

  • The value before the change, and the value after it
  • Who changed it
  • When it was changed
  • Where the request came from

This history means a corrected figure can be explained later without having to trust anyone's memory.

Backups

Backups are kept somewhere else

Every change is sent off site within about six minutes, and a full copy is made every night and every week. The nightly copy automatically retries if one fails.

Global Office: Sync keeps:

  • Recovery points for 60 days
  • A monthly recovery point for 3 years

Backups are only useful if they can actually be restored, so restores are practiced, not assumed. A real backup is restored into a separate copy, and the protected information in it is confirmed to open with keys that are kept apart from the backups. This was last done on September 18, 2026.

The network

The database is not exposed to the internet

The database cannot be contacted from the public internet. The automation and administration tools behind Sync are not reachable from the public internet without an administrator's sign-in.

Public traffic passes through Cloudflare before reaching Global Office: Sync. Requests that attempt to bypass that path are refused. Repeated wrong passwords from one address stop being accepted for a while, and repeated failed attempts to log in to the server itself are blocked.

Privacy

Sync does not build a tracking profile

Global Office: Sync keeps the information needed to operate the service and protect your account. It does not record which screens you visit and does not collect information about your device.

A sign-in ends after an hour without use, and never lasts more than 12 hours. Within the hour after it ends it is reduced to an anonymous daily count. The audit trail does keep the network address beside each change to your records, because that is what the trail is for.

Outside services

The services involved

Global Office: Sync uses outside services where they are necessary to provide a specific part of the product:

  • DigitalOcean for application hosting
  • Cloudflare for protected web traffic
  • Backblaze for private files and backups
  • Google for document reading, notification email and maps
  • Stripe for payments
  • Plaid for read-only bank connections
  • QuickBooks, Xero or FreshBooks when you choose to connect one
  • Telegram, for the error alerts sent to us when an automated step fails

Connecting one service does not automatically connect the others. Information is sent only where it is needed to perform the feature you chose to use.

No magic words

No system connected to the internet can honestly claim that nothing could ever happen to it.

What Global Office: Sync can do is reduce what is exposed, encrypt the most sensitive information, limit who can reach it, preserve the history behind every change and maintain tested backups if something goes wrong.

That is what has been built.