Your account
To keep your records private to you, LineItem needs an account. You can create one with an email address and password, or with Sign in with Apple. With Sign in with Apple you can choose to hide your real email address, and Apple gives us a private relay address instead.
We store your email address (or the relay address) and a scrambled, one-way version of your password — never the password itself. Your sign-in is kept on your iPhone in the iOS Keychain, set so that it stays on that phone and is not copied into backups that could be restored onto another device.
Bank connections, through Plaid
Connecting a bank is optional — you can upload statements or enter transactions yourself instead. If you connect one, it happens through Plaid, a company that specializes in secure bank connections. You sign in to your bank inside Plaid's screen. LineItem never sees, receives or stores your bank username or password.
Once connected, Plaid sends LineItem the following, going back up to twelve months:
- the names and types of your accounts, the bank's name, and the last four digits of each account or card number
- each transaction's date, amount, merchant name and description, whether it is still pending, and the spending category Plaid assigns to it
We do not request your balances, your full account numbers, your identity details or your investment holdings. The connection itself is held as a token that Plaid issues; we store it encrypted, and it never leaves our servers — not even to your own phone.
Plaid's handling of your data is described in the Plaid End User Privacy Policy. You can disconnect a bank at any time in LineItem's Settings; that removes the connection at Plaid, stops new transactions arriving, and keeps the ones already imported, because they are still your records.
Statements, receipts and reimbursement documents you upload
You can upload bank or card statements and reimbursement paperwork as PDFs, and photograph paper receipts with your camera. The camera is used only when you tap to scan something.
An uploaded statement or reimbursement PDF is read to pull out the transactions or lines on it, and the file itself is deleted as soon as it has been read — whether reading it succeeded or not. What stays is what was extracted: the transactions, and a few lines of item detail that the statement printed under a purchase.
Receipt photos you attach to a transaction are kept, privately, until you delete them or your account, because they are part of your records.
Reading documents with AI, and only if you agree
To read a statement or reimbursement document, LineItem can send the PDF to Anthropic, the company that makes the Claude AI models, which reads it and returns the transactions it finds. The app asks for your permission before it sends any document, and nothing is sent until you agree. If you decline, you can still connect a bank or enter transactions by hand.
When a document is sent, it goes over an encrypted connection and is used only to produce that reading for you. Under Anthropic's commercial terms, it does not use this data to train its models; it may keep it for a short period to detect abuse, as described in Anthropic's privacy policy. You can withdraw your permission at any time in Settings.
What you create in the app
The point of LineItem is what you decide about each charge. It stores the categories you use, how you split a charge between personal and work, the separate books you keep for different jobs or businesses, merchant and payer rules you ask it to remember, and the reimbursement packets and voucher lines you import and match to your purchases.
What the app never does
- No selling or renting of your information, to anyone, ever.
- No advertising, no ad networks, and no advertising identifier.
- No analytics or usage-tracking software, and no tracking of you across other apps or websites.
- No access to your contacts, location, microphone or photo library. The camera is used only when you choose to scan a receipt.
- No moving of money. LineItem reads transactions; it cannot make payments or transfers.
Where your data is kept, and how it is protected
Your records are stored by Supabase, on servers in the United States. Every table is locked so that your account can reach only your own rows — this is enforced by the database itself, not just by the app. All traffic between the app and our servers is encrypted in transit, data is encrypted at rest, and bank connection tokens are encrypted a second time on top of that.
Other companies involved, and what they are held to
These are the only companies that handle your data, each for one job, and each bound by its own terms to protect it:
- Supabase stores your account and records, and runs the servers the app talks to. See Supabase's privacy policy.
- Plaid connects your bank, if you choose to. See the Plaid End User Privacy Policy.
- Anthropic reads uploaded documents, only with your permission. See Anthropic's privacy policy.
- Apple provides Sign in with Apple and the App Store. See Apple's privacy policy.
There is no one else. We do not use advertisers, data brokers, analytics vendors or marketing services. If we ever added a company to this list, this page would say so before it happened.
How long anything is kept
- Your account and records: for as long as you keep your account, because the reason to keep them is to report on them later, including at tax time.
- Uploaded statement and reimbursement PDFs: deleted as soon as they have been read.
- Receipt photos: until you delete them or your account.
- A bank connection: until you disconnect it or delete your account.
Deleting your data
Delete your account
In LineItem, open Settings → Delete Account. This disconnects your banks at Plaid, deletes your receipt photos and any uploaded files, and permanently deletes your account and every record in it. It cannot be undone, and you do not need to contact us to do it.
Start over, but keep your account
Settings → Reset All Data disconnects your banks and deletes your records and files, leaving your sign-in in place.
Anything else
Write to hello@southernwindapps.com to ask for a copy of your data, a correction, or anything this page does not answer. We will reply within thirty days, and usually much sooner.
Children
LineItem is a financial app intended for adults. It is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect information from them. If you believe a child has created an account, write to us and we will delete it.
Your rights under the GDPR, the CCPA and similar laws
Depending on where you live, you may have the right to see the personal data we hold about you, correct it, delete it, receive a copy of it, or object to how it is used. You can delete everything yourself in the app. For anything else, write to hello@southernwindapps.com.
We do not sell or share personal information for advertising, and we do not build profiles of you, so there is nothing to opt out of.
Changes to this policy
If this policy changes, the new version appears on this page with a new date at the top. If a change would mean collecting something new, or sending your data somewhere new, the app will tell you and, where it matters, ask you first.
Who to contact
LineItem is made by Southernwind Apps LLC, a New Jersey limited liability company. Questions about this policy go to hello@southernwindapps.com, or by post to the address at the bottom of this page.