Effective October 7, 2026
lateralCFO is operated by lateralCFO, Inc., a Delaware corporation with its principal office at 12345 Parklawn Dr, Ste 200 #1016, Rockville, MD 20852 ("lateralCFO", "we", "us"). These Terms of Service govern your use of the lateralCFO application and website. By creating an account or using the service, you agree to them. If you do not agree, do not use the service.
ARBITRATION NOTICE AND CLASS ACTION WAIVER: EXCEPT AS DESCRIBED IN SECTION 18, YOU AGREE THAT DISPUTES BETWEEN YOU AND LATERALCFO WILL BE RESOLVED BY BINDING INDIVIDUAL ARBITRATION, AND YOU WAIVE YOUR RIGHT TO PARTICIPATE IN A CLASS ACTION OR CLASS-WIDE ARBITRATION. YOU MAY OPT OUT OF ARBITRATION WITHIN THIRTY DAYS OF FIRST ACCEPTING THESE TERMS, AS SECTION 18 EXPLAINS.
lateralCFO is a business product. You may use it only on behalf of a business or practice, you must be at least 18 years old, and you must have the authority to enter into these terms on behalf of the entity you represent.
You are responsible for the accuracy of the information you provide, for keeping your login credentials secure, and for all activity under your account. Tell us promptly at hello@lateralcfo.com if you believe your account has been accessed without your authorization.
lateralCFO works by connecting to QuickBooks Online or Xero through their official authorization process. You sign in with those providers directly; we never see or store your accounting credentials.
Authority to connect. You represent and warrant that you are an authorized representative with authority to set up this account as well as any subsequent connections. This applies equally whether you are connecting your own business's books or those of a client you act for.
What we do with the connection. We read only. lateralCFO retrieves financial reports and balances in order to produce your forecast and scorecard. We do not create, modify or delete anything in your books, and we do not connect to or access bank accounts.
Ending the connection. You can disconnect your accounting software at any time from Settings, without cancelling your subscription. When you do, we revoke the connection with QuickBooks or Xero directly, so access ends on their side as well as ours.
If you use lateralCFO to manage books belonging to clients, you are responsible for your relationship with those clients, including having their authorization before connecting their accounting software.
You will indemnify and hold lateralCFO harmless against any claim arising from a connection you were not authorized to make.
You retain all rights in the financial and business information in your account. We claim no ownership of it, and we use it only to provide the service as described in our Privacy Policy.
You may delete your account, or an individual client's data, at any time from Settings. Deletion is permanent and we do not keep a copy, with the single exception of payment and invoice records, which our payment processor retains for seven years as tax law requires.
A business whose accounting information is held in lateralCFO may contact us at hello@lateralcfo.com to request deletion of that information or a copy of it, regardless of who holds the subscription. We will verify the business and the individual making the request before acting on it, and we will tell the account holder that the request was made and honored.
Subscriptions are billed monthly in advance through our payment processor. Adding or removing clients takes effect at your next renewal; the current period is charged in full and is not pro-rated.
You can cancel at any time, from Settings, and you keep access until the end of the period you have paid for.
All fees are non-refundable, except where a refund is required by law. This follows from the nature of an accounting platform: value is delivered as soon as a period begins, because the moment a subscription renews lateralCFO can sync and report on a further month of your books. Cancelling stops future billing; it does not refund a period already paid for.
We may change our prices with reasonable advance notice. Promotional rates, trials and discounts are offered separately and on their own stated terms.
lateralCFO is an analysis and reporting tool. Its output, including every figure, forecast, scorecard and anything generated by artificial intelligence, is provided for informational purposes only. It is not accounting, tax, investment, legal or other professional advice, and it does not create a professional relationship between you and us.
Final verification of all calculations, ledger balances, tax positions and filings is the sole responsibility of the business or practitioner using the service. All decisions remain yours. If you forward, adapt or present lateralCFO output to a client under your own name, you are responsible for it as your own work product.
Every figure lateralCFO produces derives from what QuickBooks or Xero reports, and from the targets and mappings you set. We do not audit, correct or independently verify your underlying records. If the books are wrong, the output will be wrong.
Parts of the service use artificial intelligence to generate written commentary on your figures. This commentary is provided for informational purposes only and can be inaccurate or incomplete. Review it before relying on it or sharing it. Our Privacy Policy describes what information is sent for this purpose.
You agree not to: use the service for any unlawful purpose; connect accounting data you are not authorized to access; attempt to gain unauthorized access to the service or other users' data; interfere with or disrupt the service; reverse engineer, decompile or copy the software; use the service to build a similar or competing product; use any robot, scraper or automated process to extract data from the service; or resell or redistribute the service, except as a practitioner using it to serve your own clients, which is expressly permitted.
We do not guarantee uninterrupted availability. We may modify, suspend or discontinue features, and we will give reasonable notice of material changes where we can.
The service may link to websites we do not control, including QuickBooks, Xero and our payment processor. We are not responsible for their content, practices or policies, and we encourage you to read their terms and privacy policies. A link is not an endorsement.
You may cancel at any time from Settings. We may suspend or terminate an account that breaches these terms, that is used unlawfully, or for which payment has failed and remains unresolved. On termination your right to use the service ends; your data is handled as described in our Privacy Policy and in section 6.
THE SERVICE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND "AS AVAILABLE", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND. TO THE FULLEST EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, LATERALCFO DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, TITLE AND NON-INFRINGEMENT. WE DO NOT WARRANT THAT THE SERVICE WILL BE UNINTERRUPTED, ERROR-FREE OR SECURE, THAT DEFECTS WILL BE CORRECTED, OR THAT ANY FIGURE, FORECAST OR INSIGHT IT PRODUCES WILL BE ACCURATE OR COMPLETE.
Some states do not allow the exclusion of implied warranties. In those states, the exclusions above apply to the greatest extent permitted by law.
To the fullest extent permitted by law, lateralCFO will not be liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost revenue, lost data, or business interruption, arising out of or relating to your use of the service.
Our total liability for all claims relating to the service will not exceed the greater of the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the event giving rise to the claim, or one hundred dollars.
Some states do not allow the limitation of liability for incidental or consequential damages. In those states, our liability is limited to the greatest extent permitted by law.
You will indemnify and hold harmless lateralCFO, its officers and employees, against any claim, loss or expense arising from your use of the service, your breach of these terms, your violation of law, or your connection of accounting data you were not authorized to access.
We may update these terms. We will post the updated version with a new effective date, and where changes are material we will notify account holders by email. Continuing to use the service after the effective date means you accept the updated terms.
Notice and opportunity to cure. If you believe lateralCFO has failed to deliver the service as described, you must first give us written notice at hello@lateralcfo.com describing the problem in enough detail for us to investigate. We then have thirty days from receipt to resolve it. You may not terminate for cause, claim a refund, or begin formal proceedings until that period has passed without resolution. Nothing in this paragraph prevents either party from seeking injunctive relief where it is genuinely needed.
Arbitration. If notice and cure does not resolve the matter, any dispute arising out of or relating to these terms or the service will be settled by binding arbitration administered by JAMS under its Streamlined Arbitration Rules, before one arbitrator with substantial experience in commercial contract disputes. The arbitration will be conducted in English, in Montgomery County, Maryland, or remotely by agreement. Judgment on the award may be entered in any court of competent jurisdiction. We will pay the arbitration fees for any claim under seventy-five thousand dollars.
Individual basis only. ALL CLAIMS MUST BE BROUGHT ON AN INDIVIDUAL BASIS AND NOT AS A CLASS, COLLECTIVE OR CONSOLIDATED ACTION. YOU AND LATERALCFO WAIVE ANY RIGHT TO A JURY TRIAL. If this waiver is found unenforceable, the arbitration agreement in this section does not apply and disputes will be resolved in the courts named below.
Exceptions. Either party may bring a qualifying claim in small claims court, and either party may seek injunctive relief from a court at any time to prevent infringement or misuse of intellectual property or confidential information.
Opting out. You may opt out of arbitration by writing to lateralCFO, Inc., 12345 Parklawn Dr, Ste 200 #1016, Rockville, MD 20852, postmarked within thirty days of first accepting these terms. Include your name, your account email address, and a clear statement that you are opting out of arbitration. Opting out does not affect any other part of these terms.
Goverencing law and venue. These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Maryland, without regard to its conflict of law rules. Where a dispute is not subject to arbitration, it will be brought in the state or federal courts located in Montgomery County, Maryland, and you consent to their jurisdiction.
Intellectual property. lateralCFO, Inc. owns all right, title and interest in the service and everything it is built from: the software and source code, the interface and its design, the analysis, forecasting and scorecard methodology, the templates, reports and documentation, and the lateralCFO name, logo and marks. These are protected by copyright, trademark and trade secret law, and by international treaty.
What you are granted. A limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable right to use the service while your subscription is active, for your own business or for clients you are authorized to act for. Nothing further is granted. All rights not expressly granted here are reserved to lateralCFO, and no license arises by implication, estoppel or otherwise. You own your data, as section 6 sets out; our ownership of the service does not touch it.
Protecting it. The restrictions in section 11 are part of this: you may not copy, reverse engineer, decompile or disassemble the service, use it to build a similar or competing product, or extract its data or logic by automated means. You may not remove or obscure any copyright or trademark notice.
Confidentiality. The methodology by which lateralCFO derives drivers, forecasts and scorecard results, and any non-public feature, pricing or roadmap information you learn through the service, is confidential and proprietary to us. You will not disclose it to any third party, except to your own clients in the ordinary course of using the service as intended.
Improvement data. We may use aggregated and de-identified information about how the service is used to operate, maintain and improve it. This never identifies you, your business or your clients, and it is never the content of your books.
Feedback. If you send us suggestions, ideas or feedback about the service, we may use them without restriction and without obligation to you. This gives us no right to your data.
Severability and waiver. If any provision of these terms is held unenforceable, it will be limited or removed to the minimum extent necessary and the rest remains in force. Our failure to enforce a provision is not a waiver of it.
Entire agreement. These terms, together with the Privacy Policy, are the entire agreement between us about the service.
Assignment. You may not assign these terms without our written consent. We may assign them to an affiliate, or in connection with a merger, acquisition or sale of assets.
Survival. Sections 6, 7, 8, 9, 14, 15, 16, 18, 20 and this section survive termination of your account, along with any payment obligation already incurred.
This section applies when you use lateralCFO to work with accounting data belonging to your clients. If you use lateralCFO only for your own business, it does not apply to you.
Roles. You are the controller of your clients' accounting data: you decide whose books are connected, what is done with the resulting analysis, and how long it is kept. lateralCFO is the processor, acting on your instructions. You are responsible for having the authority to connect each client's accounting software, and for your own obligations to those clients.
Our instructions. We process client data only to provide the service as described in these terms and our Privacy Policy, and as you direct through the application. We do not sell it, do not use it for advertising, do not use one client's data to inform analysis for another, and do not use it to train artificial intelligence models.
Confidentiality. Access to client data within lateralCFO is restricted to personnel who need it to operate or support the service, and those personnel are bound by confidentiality obligations.
Security. We maintain technical and organizational measures appropriate to the data: accounting access tokens encrypted with AES-256-GCM, with the key held separately from the database; all data encrypted in transit; restricted access to production systems; and read-only access to connected accounting software.
Sub-processors. We use the providers listed in our Privacy Policy, and you consent to their use. We will update that list before engaging a new provider that processes client data, and you may object by terminating your subscription.
Assisting you. If one of your clients exercises a right over their data, we will assist you in responding, so far as the application allows. A business whose accounting data is held in lateralCFO may also contact us directly at hello@lateralcfo.com to request deletion or a copy. We verify the business and the individual before acting, and we will tell you that the request was made and honored. You cannot block such a request, and we will not act on one without telling you.
Deleting client data. You can delete an individual client's data at any time from Settings. Deletion is immediate and permanent, removes the accounting connection as well as the figures, and we do not keep a copy. Residual copies may persist in encrypted backups for a limited period before being overwritten. On termination of your subscription, client data is retained as described in our Privacy Policy until you delete it or ask us to.
Security incidents. If we become aware of a breach affecting client data you have connected, we will notify you without undue delay, with the information we have about what happened, what was affected, and what we are doing about it.
Audit. On reasonable written request, and no more than once a year unless required by law or following a security incident, we will provide the information reasonably necessary for you to confirm our compliance with this section.
Questions about these terms: hello@lateralcfo.com
lateralCFO, Inc., 12345 Parklawn Dr, Ste 200 #1016, Rockville, MD 20852