Who we are
Proper Spreadsheets is run by Proper Spreadsheets Ltd, 71-75 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London, WC2H 9JQ, United Kingdom. The company is registered in England and Wales, company number 17522267. The address above is its registered office. We are the controller of the personal information described here. You can write to us at the address at the end of this page.
This page was last changed on 21 October 2026.
What we collect and why
A file you check, or a Google Sheets link you give us. We read the file to check it and delete it when the check ends. The report and the marked up copy wait in memory until your browser collects them, for ten minutes at most.
Nothing about your file is sent to any other company.
A description of a spreadsheet you want made, or a change you ask for. It is sent to Anthropic, with the design it changes, and is not kept.
An account, if you make one: your email address, the browsers you sign in from, a record of what was done on the account, and any passkey or authenticator app you add. On a paid plan, each check's findings, which never include a figure or word from your cells, and if you connect a folder for us to watch, the key to that folder and the names of the workbooks in it. All of it is encrypted.
A payment. Stripe takes it on its own pages, and we never see your card. When a plan starts with a free week, we keep a scrambled code for the card, so that each card has one free week.
Counts of requests from each internet address, so that nobody can use up the service, and a daily count of visitors, made from your address and browser scrambled with a key that is deleted at midnight. Our logs record how each request went, never what you wrote or uploaded.
We use the counts and logs to keep the service working and fair, which is our legitimate interest, and everything else to provide what you ask for, which is our contract with you. You need to give us an email address only to make an account.
Who receives it
Our hosting company, which runs our servers in the European Union; Stripe, for payments; Anthropic, for designing spreadsheets; our email provider, for the emails we send; and the company that stores any folder you connect. Stripe, Anthropic and our email provider are in the United States, and what goes to them is covered by the safeguards UK law requires.
How long we keep it
Without an account, a file, a description or a design is deleted within ten minutes, the request counts within 30 days, and the scrambled visitor values at midnight UTC.
An account is kept until you delete it. Findings are kept while your plan lasts, going back 400 days for a watched file. A watched folder's key and file names are deleted when you disconnect it. A browser you signed in from is forgotten 400 days after it was last seen, the daily counts after 400 days, when a free account checked a file after 90 days, and the scrambled card code after two years.
Our logs last as long as our hosting company keeps them, and its daily copies of the server's disk at least seven days.
Cookies
Three cookies, all for signing in: one for ten minutes when you ask for a sign in link, so the browser that asked is signed straight in, one keeps you signed in for up to twelve hours, and one recognises your browser for 400 days so we can tell you when your account is used from a new one. Your browser also keeps, in its own storage, what you are working on and what you have paid for, until it is no longer needed. All of this is needed for the service to work, and none of it tracks you.
Your rights
You can ask for a copy of your information, and ask us to correct it, delete it, limit or stop using it, or give it to you in a form a computer can read. You can object to the counts and logs. An account can be downloaded and deleted from its account page. For anything else, write to us at the address below.
You can also complain to the Information Commissioner's Office, at ico.org.uk.
If we emailed you
If we emailed your practice about the checker, what we hold about you and how to stop it are on the page at /outreach.