Privacy policy.

1. Who this policy is from

Zehen is billing, inventory and accounting software for Indian businesses, published and operated from India under the name Zehen. In this policy, "we" and "us" mean Zehen, and "you" means anyone who uses the Zehen app or visits zehenapp.com.

This policy covers two separate things, and it is worth keeping them apart in your head, because they work very differently:

• The Zehen desktop app that you install and run on your own computer.
• The zehenapp.com website that you are reading now.

You can reach us about anything in this policy at hello@zehenapp.com.

2. Your data in the Zehen app

This is the part that matters most, so we will be direct about it.

Zehen is not a cloud service. When you install the app, it creates a database on your own machine, or on a server inside your own shop network if you run several counters. Every bill you raise, every item, every party, every payment and every ledger entry is written there and stays there.

We do not receive a copy. We cannot see your sales, your customers, your suppliers, your stock or your margins. There is no account with us that holds your books, no sync process that uploads them, and no back door that would let us read them. If you unplug the machine from the internet, the app keeps working, which is only possible because nothing it needs is sitting on our side.

The app sends us no usage data either. There is no analytics library, no crash reporter and no telemetry in it. We do not know how many bills you raised this month, which screens you use, or whether you opened the app at all.

Licensing is checked offline. Your licence key is signed cryptographically when it is issued, and the app verifies that signature on your own computer. It does not call our servers to activate, to check in periodically, or to confirm you are still allowed to run it.

The practical consequence of all this is that backups are yours to take. Because we hold no copy of your data, we cannot restore it for you if a hard disk fails or a machine is stolen. The app can produce backups, and you should keep them somewhere other than the machine that runs Zehen.

3. Features that connect outward

Some things genuinely need the internet. These only send data when you switch them on and use them, and in each case the data goes to that service, not to us.

• WhatsApp. If you connect WhatsApp to send bills, statements or payment reminders, the message and the attached document go to your customer through WhatsApp. That traffic is handled by WhatsApp and Meta under their own terms and privacy policy, not ours.
• e-invoices and e-way bills. If you raise these, the invoice details go to the Government of India's GST systems, because that is what filing them means. This is governed by the GST rules and the portal's own terms.
• Printing and PDFs. These are produced on your own machine and go wherever you send them.

If you never turn these on, the app has no reason to make an outbound connection at all.

4. This website

zehenapp.com records basic visit information so we can tell which pages are useful and whether anyone is finding us. It is deliberately built to collect as little as possible.

Because none of this identifies you and nothing is stored on your device, there is no cookie banner to click. That is not an oversight. There is nothing to consent to.

These records are held by Cloudflare, which hosts the site, and they are deleted automatically 180 days after they are written.

5. When you contact us

If you email us, message us on WhatsApp, call us or book a demo, we keep what you send: your name, your contact details, your business name if you mention it, and the conversation itself. We use it to answer you and to follow up about Zehen. We do not add you to a marketing list you did not ask for, and we do not pass your details to anyone else.

6. If you buy a licence

To issue a licence and a valid tax invoice we need your name, your business name, your contact details, your address, and your GSTIN if you have one. Payment is made by UPI or bank transfer, so what we see is the reference for that transfer. We never see or store your card details, UPI PIN, bank passwords or any other credentials, because the payment does not pass through this website.

Indian tax law requires us to keep invoices and the records behind them for several years, so purchase records stay with us for as long as the law requires, even if you later stop using Zehen.

7. Who else sees anything

We do not sell personal data, we do not rent it, and we do not share it for anyone else's advertising. A small number of service providers necessarily handle some of it in order to do their job:

• Cloudflare, which hosts zehenapp.com and stores the visit records described above.
• Our email provider, which carries messages between you and us.

Beyond that, we would only disclose information if a law, a court or a government authority validly required it of us.

8. How long we keep things

• Website visit records: 180 days, then deleted automatically.
• Emails and messages: as long as we may reasonably need them to support you, and then deleted on request.
• Purchase and invoice records: for the period Indian tax and accounting law requires.
• Your business data in the app: for as long as you keep it. It is on your machine, so the decision is entirely yours.

9. Your rights

Under India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, you can ask us to:

• tell you what personal data of yours we hold and what we have done with it,
• correct anything that is wrong, incomplete or out of date,
• erase what we hold, where we are not required by law to keep it,
• nominate someone to exercise these rights on your behalf if you die or become incapable of doing so, and
• raise a grievance about how we have handled your data.

Write to hello@zehenapp.com and we will respond. If you are not satisfied with how we deal with a grievance, you may take it to the Data Protection Board of India.

One honest note on erasure: we can delete what we hold, which is correspondence and purchase records. We cannot delete the data inside your copy of the app, because we have no access to it. That deletion is something only you can perform, on your own machine.

10. Security

The website is served over HTTPS. Access to the small amount of information we hold is limited to people who need it to run the business. Your app database sits on hardware you control, which means its security is largely in your hands: keep the machine updated, use a password on it, restrict who can log in, and keep your backups somewhere safe. No system is perfectly secure, and we do not claim otherwise.

11. Children

Zehen is business software sold to businesses. It is not directed at children, and we do not knowingly collect personal data from anyone under 18.

12. Changes to this policy

If we change how any of this works, we will update this page and change the date at the top. If a change is significant, and particularly if it ever affected the promises in the short version above, we would tell licence holders directly rather than quietly editing the page.