Terms of Service
These terms govern the use of the Asurnd website and platform. If you use the platform on behalf of a client or partner firm, your organization's engagement letter or partner agreement with Asurnd also applies, and where the two differ, that agreement wins.
1. The agreement
By signing in to the platform or using the website you agree to these terms and to our Privacy Policy. The platform asks you to confirm this by ticking a box at every sign-in, and records it. "Asurnd", "we" and "us" mean the business that operates asurnd.ca and app.asurnd.ca. "You" means the person using the service and, where that person acts for a company, that company.
Access to the platform is by invitation, under an engagement letter (for clients) or a partner agreement (for accounting and advisory firms). These terms add the platform-specific rules; they do not replace those agreements.
2. Accounts and access
- An account is personal. Keep your password and your authenticator app private, do not share your sign-in link, and tell us at once if you think your account has been used by someone else.
- You must be authorized by your organization to use the platform on its behalf and to upload the information you upload.
- Your organization's administrator controls who in that organization has access and at what level. We act on the administrator's instructions.
- We may suspend an account that we reasonably believe is compromised or being misused, and we will tell the organization's administrator when we do.
3. Acceptable use
You agree not to:
- upload information you do not have the right to share, including another company's confidential information or personal information you are not permitted to disclose;
- upload fabricated, backdated or altered records, or ask us to present them as evidence (see section 6);
- try to access another client's workspace or data, probe or test the platform's security without our written permission, or interfere with its operation;
- upload malware, or use the platform to send unsolicited messages;
- scrape, copy or resell the platform, or use it to build a competing product;
- upload social insurance numbers, bank account details, health information or other data the claim does not need.
If you find a security problem, please report it responsibly as described on our Security page. We will not take action against good-faith research that follows that process.
4. Your data
- You own it. Records you upload or connect, and the deliverables we prepare from them (narratives, schedules, the defence file), belong to the client. You grant us a licence to store, process and reproduce them only to prepare and support the claim, to run the platform, and to keep the records the law requires us to keep.
- It stays separate. Every record carries the identity of the client it belongs to, and every read and write is scoped to that client. We never combine two clients' data in a query, a search or a prompt.
- It stays in Canada, except for the AI provider described in section 5 and the limited cases listed in the Privacy Policy.
- You can take it with you. You can export your workspace at any time and when the engagement ends.
- We keep it for the review window. See the retention section of the Privacy Policy. Delete requests after filing are honoured, subject to what we must keep by law.
- De-identified learning. We may use de-identified, aggregated information (never a client's identifiable records, and never to train an external provider's model) to improve our checklists and methods. A client can opt out in its engagement letter.
5. AI-assisted drafts
The platform uses AI to classify documents and draft narratives. You acknowledge that:
- AI features are off for a new client and are enabled only with the client's written agreement, which can be withdrawn;
- when enabled, excerpts of the client's records are sent to an external model provider outside Canada under terms that prohibit using them to train models, as described in the Privacy Policy;
- every AI output is a draft that cites the records it was drawn from; a senior consultant reviews it before it is used, and nothing is approved, filed or sent without a person's recorded sign-off;
- AI output can be wrong or incomplete. Clients remain responsible for confirming that the facts in a claim are true.
6. SR&ED claims and responsibility
The claim is the claimant's. Asurnd prepares and supports SR&ED claims; the client remains the taxpayer and is responsible for the accuracy and completeness of the information it provides and for the claim it files. A client's accountant or the client itself files the return.
- The platform and the website do not provide legal, accounting or tax advice beyond the SR&ED claim-preparation services described in the engagement letter.
- You confirm that records you upload are genuine and contemporaneous, or are clearly labelled as reconstructed. We do not create evidence, and we will decline to include records we have reason to believe are fabricated.
- Where the law requires it, we identify ourselves as the claim preparer and disclose our fee arrangement on the prescribed form.
- The CRA sets SR&ED program rules and may change them. Estimates, percentages and projections shown on the platform or the website are illustrative; the amount actually allowed is decided by the CRA.
7. Our intellectual property
The platform, its design, software, evidence model, checklists, templates, prompts and documentation are Asurnd's and are protected by copyright and other laws. You get a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable right to use the platform for your own SR&ED claims (or, for partner firms, your clients' claims) for as long as your agreement with us lasts. Feedback you give us may be used without obligation.
8. Connected services
If you connect a third-party service (for example a GitHub organization), you authorize us to read from it using the read-only permissions you grant, and you confirm you are allowed to do so under that service's terms. We never write to connected systems. You can disconnect a service at any time; records already imported stay in the workspace until deleted under section 4.
9. Availability and changes
We aim to keep the platform available at all times but do not guarantee uninterrupted service. We may change, add or remove features, and we will give reasonable notice of changes that remove functionality a client relies on. Planned maintenance is announced in advance where practicable.
10. Fees
Fees for claim preparation are set out in the engagement letter or partner agreement. Use of the platform itself is included in those fees unless that agreement says otherwise. The website is free to use.
11. Warranties and liability
The platform is provided as described in your agreement with us. Beyond that, and to the extent the law allows, it is provided "as is", and we do not promise that it will meet every requirement or be error-free.
To the extent permitted by law, Asurnd is not liable for indirect, consequential or special loss, or for loss of profit, revenue, data or tax credits, arising from use of the platform or website. Our total liability for any claim connected to the platform is limited to the fees paid to us for the engagement in which the claim arose, except where the law does not allow that limit, for example for liability arising from our fraud or gross negligence, or where your engagement letter provides otherwise. Nothing in these terms limits any warranty or remedy that the law does not permit us to limit.
12. Ending the agreement
Your right to use the platform ends when your agreement with us ends, when your organization's administrator removes your access, or when we end it under section 2. On the end of a client engagement we provide an export of the workspace and then retain or delete the records as the Privacy Policy describes. Sections 4, 6, 7, 11 and 13 continue to apply.
13. General
- Governing law. These terms are governed by the laws of the Province of Ontario and the federal laws of Canada applicable there, and the courts of Ontario have jurisdiction, unless your engagement letter says otherwise.
- Changes. We may update these terms. The date at the top shows the current version; material changes are announced to clients and users before they take effect, and continued use after that date is acceptance.
- Entire agreement. These terms, the Privacy Policy and your engagement letter or partner agreement are the whole agreement about the platform. If any part is unenforceable, the rest still applies.
- Language. These terms are written in English. A French version will be provided to clients in Quebec on request; if the two differ, the French version prevails for those clients.
- Contact. legal@asurnd.ca