AI does the first pass. You keep the review.
When a Workflow reads your document and prepares a transaction, you can see the document it read, the decision it suggested, and the reasoning behind it. This page explains what AI does, what it does not do, and what happens to your data.
The short version, if you are in a hurry.
Myaccountant uses AI for one specific thing: reducing the bookkeeping work people usually do by hand. Workflows read real-world documents, receipts, property manager statements, rideshare summaries, and new-hire onboarding forms, then prepare the result for review.
Every decision a Workflow makes is logged, attributed, and reviewable. You see the source document, what was extracted from it, what decision was applied, and why. Nothing is a black box.
We do not use your data to train external AI models. We do not sell it. We do not share it with third parties beyond the processors we need to run the service. When you close your account, you can export everything; then it is deleted.
The AI does the first pass. You, or your accountant, review it. The review remains yours.
What the AI is doing, in specific terms.
Every Workflow follows the same four-step pattern. Each step is inspected and logged. Nothing happens that you cannot see.
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Read the source document.
A Workflow receives a real-world document: a PDF statement, a forwarded email, a photographed receipt, an uploaded spreadsheet. The AI reads the document, including its text and layout, and produces a machine-readable version of what the document says. For image-based documents, this reading step includes image-to-text extraction.
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Extract what matters.
From the document the AI has read, the Workflow identifies the specific fields that matter for its job, dates, amounts, counterparties, property addresses, super fund details. Each field is extracted as a discrete value with a confidence score and a pointer back to the region of the document it came from. The extraction uses Anthropic's Claude via their API; we do not train models on your data, and Anthropic does not retain or train on your data under the terms of our agreement with them.
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Apply a decision.
With the extracted values, the Workflow suggests a decision, which property the transaction belongs to, which category it falls into, whether it may be deductible, which account it should post to. The rules the Workflow uses are published on each individual Workflow detail page, so the Receipts Workflow has one set of rules, the Property Workflow has another.
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Post with a full audit trail.
The transaction is posted to your ledger, with the source document attached, the extracted fields recorded, the decision logged, and the reasoning saved. Every posted transaction is one click away from the four-step trail that produced it.
Any one of these four steps can be reviewed. Any one of them can be corrected. The Workflow prepares the work; you keep the authority.
What the AI is not doing.
Listing what AI does is easy. Listing what it does not do is more useful, because it tells you where the boundaries are.
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Not giving financial advice.
myaccountant shows you your position. It does not tell you what to do with it. It does not recommend investments, debt strategies, or tax-minimisation plans. Those are conversations for a human adviser. We are explicit about this because the line between "showing" and "advising" is where regulated financial advice begins in Australia, and we are not on that side of the line.
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Not lodging without your authority.
No Workflow submits a lodgement to the ATO on its own. BAS, IAS, income tax returns, STP pay events, these all require your explicit action or your accountant's explicit action before they are submitted. The Workflow prepares; the human approves.
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Not training external models on your data.
We do not send your data to external AI providers for model training. When AI processing is needed, we call Anthropic's Claude API with data-training opt-out in place. Anthropic does not retain your data beyond the duration of the call and does not use it to train their models.
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Not making decisions your accountant cannot review.
Every decision a Workflow makes is one click from the reasoning that produced it. This is the whole premise. If we ever build a feature where a decision cannot be inspected, we will not ship it.
Where your data is, and what happens to it.
The short answer is: your data lives in Australia, it is encrypted in transit and at rest, we do not sell it, and we do not use it to train anything beyond your own Workflow's learning of your specific categorisation preferences. The longer answer is below.
Data residency.
All user data is stored on Australian servers, hosted with Amazon Web Services in the Sydney region (ap-southeast-2).
Encryption.
Data is encrypted at rest and in transit using industry-standard encryption.
AI processing.
When a Workflow runs, extracted data is processed by the AI inside our infrastructure. For tasks that require large-language-model processing (such as reading receipts or statements), we call Anthropic's Claude API. Anthropic processes the call in US-based servers and does not retain your data beyond the duration of the call. The primary Workflow data, your documents, your transaction records, your audit trails, remains on our Sydney-hosted infrastructure.
Retention.
Your source documents, your transaction records, and your audit trails are retained for as long as you keep your account, plus any retention window the ATO requires for records you have lodged against. Prompts sent to AI models and the resulting outputs are retained as part of the Workflow's audit trail.
Export and deletion.
You can export your full data, source documents, transactions, audit trails, at any time, in formats your next platform can read. If you close your account, your data is deleted within 30 days, subject to any legal retention obligations the ATO imposes.
What you can do, at any time.
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See the audit trail. Every Workflow decision is one click from the document, extraction, and reasoning that produced it. Open any posted transaction and the trail is there.
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Override any decision. If a Workflow suggestion is wrong, change it. The original suggestion is preserved in the audit trail; your correction is recorded as a new event.
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Export everything. Source documents, transactions, audit trails, Workflow configurations, all exportable at any time, in machine-readable formats.
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Delete your account. One action. Your data is deleted within 30 days. Records the ATO legally requires us to retain are held for exactly that long and no longer.
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Ask us a specific question. If you want to know something about how your data is handled that this page does not answer, email privacy@myaccountant.com.au. A human responds within five business days.
What the law says. What we do about it.
From 10 December 2026, Australian privacy law (APP 1.7) requires platforms that use automated decision-making involving personal information to disclose, in plain language, what their AI does and how it does it. The law applies when an AI system makes, or substantially assists in making, a decision that could meaningfully affect your rights or interests.
Myaccountant goes further than the minimum the law requires. Every AI suggestion on the platform is visible, explained, and reversible. Every extracted field shows the source document it came from. Every suggested category shows the confidence level and the alternatives. Every Workflow record shows what the AI did, when, and why. This was our design before the law required it; the law commencing simply formalises the posture.
If you want to understand a specific suggestion the AI made on your account, the "Why did you suggest this?" link on any AI-assisted action opens the reasoning, source document, confidence level, past patterns that informed the suggestion. If you want to see every AI-assisted action on your account over time, the AI activity log is available from your account settings. If you want to disable AI on your account entirely, you can, from the same settings menu.
When we get it wrong.
AI extraction is accurate most of the time. It is not accurate every time. A property manager's statement format changes and a field moves. A receipt is photographed in poor light and a total is misread. A rideshare summary uses a new column header and the tip is posted as a fare. This is the nature of the technology, and we do not pretend otherwise.
When a Workflow gets something wrong, the audit trail shows you exactly where. You correct it; the correction is logged; your books are accurate. If a category of error recurs, a particular property manager's format we're misreading, a particular rideshare service we've not adapted to, we fix the Workflow itself, and the fix applies to every user who runs that Workflow after that. The errors do not silently compound. They surface, they get fixed, and the platform gets better.
How this page stays true.
This page is reviewed annually at minimum, by myaccountant's legal counsel and technical leadership, against the actual state of the product. It is reviewed earlier whenever a new Workflow ships that introduces a new class of AI decision, or whenever the regulatory environment changes materially.
- Last reviewed
- 23 April 2026
- Next review due
- 23 April 2027