Professional Terms

1. Who we are and what these terms cover

AccountHouse Advisors is operated by IA Systems, based in Dubai, United Arab Emirates (“we”, “us”). It lets households that use AccountHouse work with the professionals they choose — financial planners, accountants, and tax, investment, insurance, mortgage, wealth and retirement advisers — and share parts of their AccountHouse records with them, on the household’s terms.

“You” means the professional who holds an AccountHouse Advisors account. Where you sign up a firm or join one, “your firm” means that firm, and the person who signs up a firm confirms that they are allowed to bind it.

The Professional Privacy Notice forms part of these terms. Your AccountHouse Advisors account is separate from any AccountHouse household or Accmerio account you hold under the same email address; each stays under its own product’s terms.

2. AccountHouse does not give advice

AccountHouse provides the technology only. It does not give financial, investment, tax, insurance, mortgage, pension or legal advice, does not recommend any professional, product or course of action, and does not supervise the services you provide.

• Your advice is yours. You alone are responsible for the advice and services you give, for whether they suit your client, and for the disclosures, agreements and records your profession and the law require.
• Verification is narrow. A badge on your account means only that we checked a particular document or register entry on a particular date and that it had not expired. It is not an endorsement, a rating, or a guarantee of your competence or conduct, and you must not present it as one.
• A household’s figures are its own. What a household shares with you is what it recorded in AccountHouse. We do not audit it, and it may be incomplete or out of date. Check what you rely on.
• Never present anything you share through AccountHouse Advisors as advice from AccountHouse.

3. Your account

• You must be at least 18, and practise, or be about to practise, in the United Arab Emirates, India or the United States, where AccountHouse Advisors is available.
• Give accurate information, keep it up to date, and use your own name. One person, one account.
• Keep your password to yourself. You can turn on two-step sign-in under Security; some sensitive actions ask for a code from your authenticator app even when it is off.
• Tell us at once at support@theaccounthouse.com if you think someone else has used your account.

4. Verification

Before your workspace opens, we check who you are and the licences or registrations you tell us you hold. Your application gives us the documents it asks for: an identity document and, for each credential, its number and, where you have one, a copy of the certificate. A firm also gives its trade licence or registration.

• We check credentials against the regulator’s own public register where there is one, and may ask you for more information or documents. We decide whether to approve an application, and may decline one.
• Each check we complete shows as a badge only while it is current. When a licence or document reaches its expiry date, its badge stops showing until you send the renewal and we check it again. We email you 30 days and 7 days before, and when it lapses.
• We may check again at any time. Tell us at once if a licence or registration you listed is suspended, revoked, restricted or lapses, or if anything you told us stops being true.

5. Your professional obligations

• Hold every licence, registration and insurance your work requires, in each place you do it, and work only within them.
• Follow the law and your profession’s rules, including on conflicts of interest, clients’ money, disclosures, record-keeping and data protection.
• Be clear with clients about who you are, whom you work for, what you charge and how you are paid, including any commission.

6. Working with households

A household works with you only if its owner chooses to, and the owner decides what you can see and for how long. The owner can narrow or end your access at any time, and that takes effect at once.

• Use what a household shares only to provide the services it asked you for. Do not sell it, use it for marketing, or combine it with other data about the household without its permission.
• Keep it confidential and secure. Do not copy it out of AccountHouse Advisors unless the owner has allowed downloads; every download is recorded and the owner can see it.
• When your access ends, you keep only what you wrote yourself — your notes, recommendations, messages and plans — as a read-only record. The household’s own figures stop being available to you.
• You may change a household’s records only where the owner has allowed it, and only its assets and investment records. Every change is shown to the owner, who can reverse it.

7. Planning tools

• The planning tools work out figures from the inputs you give them: facts and projections, never advice. The inputs you choose, and any advice you give with a plan, are yours. No tax law is built in: a tax scenario uses the brackets and rates you enter.
• You may start a plan for a client from the parts of their figures they let you see. Each part read is recorded and shown to them, and a copy of what was used is kept with the plan while the relationship lasts and they still let you see it.
• A client sees a plan only when you share it. A shared plan is stamped with your name, your firm and the date, and says it is your advice, not AccountHouse’s. A plan a client has been shown cannot be deleted; you can stop sharing it.
• Check every result before you rely on it or share it. A projection is not a promise, and AccountHouse does not guarantee that one will come true.

8. Your forms, links and questions

• Ask only what you need for the services you offer. Never ask for passwords, sign-in codes, or full card or account numbers. Files and signatures cannot be asked for.
• A registration link creates no client by itself: AccountHouse reviews every registration, and only an approved one connects the household with you, on what it chose to share. You are told someone registered, and who only once it is approved; if it is not approved, you are told so, not why.
• Send questions by email only to people you have a reason to contact, who expect to hear from you. AccountHouse sends them in your name; the link opens only with a code sent to that address.
• Answers are the respondent's words given to you. A client's answers are no longer shown to you once the relationship ends.

9. Firms and colleagues

• The person who signs up a firm becomes its first firm admin. Once we have verified the firm, a firm admin can invite colleagues by email, each with a role. Every colleague completes their own application and is verified individually.
• Your firm is responsible for what its people do in AccountHouse Advisors. Make sure only its current people have access, and tell us when someone leaves.
• Roles: firm admins, advisors, accountants and planners take on clients. Support staff take on none, but can be assigned to a client and then work within what that client allowed. Compliance staff oversee the firm's clients — who works with whom, what each allowed, and the record of what was opened — and never see a client's data; they are never assigned. A firm always keeps an admin. Only those who take on clients make or send forms, or use the forms the firm shares, and households cannot ask compliance or support staff to connect.
• When someone leaves the firm, or a firm admin removes them, their work on the firm's clients ends. The clients they lead stay with them, outside the firm, and the firm's other colleagues on those clients lose access. The households concerned are told.

10. Fees

Fees between you and your clients are agreed between you and them. AccountHouse does not set, collect or receive them, and is not a party to your agreement with a client.

If AccountHouse ever charges you for AccountHouse Advisors, the price will be agreed with you in writing before it applies.

11. Acceptable use

• Do not misrepresent who you are, your qualifications, your firm or a badge.
• Never ask a household for its AccountHouse password or sign-in codes.
• Do not try to reach data you have not been given, test or work around our security, or collect data from the service by automated means.
• Do not share your account, or let anyone else use your access.
• What you write — your profile, messages and recommendations — must be accurate, lawful and not misleading, and must not include anything you have no right to share.

12. What you write

You keep the rights in what you write. You allow us to store it, show it to the people you share it with — and, for a profile you publish, to anyone — and keep the copies the law or these terms require.

13. Suspension and ending

We may suspend your account, hide your profile or end your access if you break these terms, if a licence you rely on lapses or is withdrawn, if information you gave us was false, if your account puts households or the service at risk, or where the law requires it. Suspending an account signs it out everywhere. We will tell you why, unless the law or an investigation prevents it.

• You can leave at any time. Email support@theaccounthouse.com from the address on your account, and we will delete it as the Professional Privacy Notice describes.
• We can end your access by telling you at least 30 days ahead, or at once for a serious or repeated breach of these terms, or where the law requires it.

14. Liability and indemnity

AccountHouse Advisors is provided as is and as available. To the fullest extent the law allows, we give no warranty that it will be uninterrupted or error-free, or that the information shown in it is complete or correct.

We are not responsible for the advice or services you give, or for any loss a client suffers from them.

To the fullest extent the law allows, we are not liable for lost profits, revenue, business or data, or for any indirect or consequential loss. Our total liability arising out of or in connection with AccountHouse Advisors in any 12 months is limited to the fees you paid us for it in the 12 months before the event that gave rise to the claim, or AED 1,000, whichever is more.

Nothing in these terms limits liability that the law does not allow to be limited, such as for fraud.

You are responsible for, and will cover us against, claims by your clients or any authority that arise from your advice or services, from your use of what households share with you, or from your use of AccountHouse Advisors in breach of these terms or the law.

15. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. Each version carries its effective date at the top of this page, and the version you accepted is recorded.

A change to what you or we must do takes effect no sooner than five days after it is published, and we email you about it. If you do not agree to a new version, stop using AccountHouse Advisors before it takes effect and ask us to delete your account.

16. Governing law and disputes

These terms are governed by the laws of the United Arab Emirates as applied in the Emirate of Dubai. The courts of Dubai have exclusive jurisdiction over any dispute arising out of or in connection with them. Before going to court, each side will first try in good faith to settle the dispute by talking to the other for at least 30 days.

Nothing in these terms limits a right that you have under a law that cannot be excluded or limited by agreement. If a part of these terms is found to be unenforceable, the rest continues to apply.

17. Contact

Questions about these terms, your account or your verification: email support@theaccounthouse.com. We answer usually within one business day.