Privacy policy

Odue is a commercial collections agency. We recover past-due business-to-business invoices on behalf of the companies owed them. This policy covers three groups of people, and they are treated differently because their relationship with us is different:

• Our clients’ people. The named contacts at a company that places accounts with us, including anyone given a sign-in to the client portal.
• Debtor contacts. The people we speak to at a business that owes one of our clients money. We did not get your details from you — they came from our client, from the invoice, or from the business itself.
• Visitors. Anybody who reads this website or sends us the inquiry form on the home page.

We collect information about businesses and about the people who act for them in a business capacity. We do not knowingly collect information about children, and we do not place consumer debt.

• Account and invoice records placed with us by our client: the debtor business, its address, invoice numbers, amounts, dates, purchase orders and any description our client supplied.
• Contact details for people at the debtor business and at our client: name, job title, phone numbers, email addresses and postal addresses.
• A record of every contact. Calls placed and received, emails sent and received, letters, notes, promises to pay, disputes and payment plans — with the date, who made the contact and what was said. This record is append-only: entries are never edited or deleted, and a correction is a new entry.
• Meetings we arrange with a debtor contact by phone or video: the time, how long, who with, what about, and your answer from the meeting page, including a note and any other times you suggest.
• Payments and the plans behind them: amount, date, method, the invoice the money was applied to, and the provider reference.
• Documents uploaded by our client or by us — invoice copies, proofs of delivery, correspondence, purchase orders and signed agreements.
• Sign-in and audit records for portal and staff users: the email address access is keyed on, when it was last used, and a row-level log of what was changed, by whom and when.
• Anything you send us through the inquiry form, the portal, a meeting page, or the forms on a payment page — including a dispute you raise and the detail you give with it.

We do not run advertising, analytics, tracking pixels or third-party cookies on this website. The cookies we set are functional: the session cookie that keeps you signed in, set by our authentication provider, and small preferences, such as the time zone your browser reports so that times show in your own zone. None is used for tracking.

To do the job we were engaged to do, and to be able to prove how we did it. Concretely: to identify the debt and the people who can settle it; to make and record contact; to take and apply payments; to tell our client what has happened on their accounts; to handle a dispute; to meet our obligations under the law that governs debt collection and under our agreement with our client; and to defend the record if any of it is ever challenged.

We do not sell personal information, we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising, and we do not use it to train machine-learning models.

Only where it is needed to do the work, and only as much as is needed:

• Our client — the company that placed the account — sees the account, the invoices, the contact record and the payments on their own placements, and nothing about anybody else’s.
• Our payment processor handles card payments. Card numbers are entered on their page, not ours: we never see or store them, and what comes back to us is an amount, a date and a reference.
• Plaid provides the bank sign-in used to link a bank account. See “Linking a bank account” below.
• Intuit (QuickBooks Online) and Xero hold the books a client may choose to connect. We read from them; we send them nothing about anyone. See “Connecting your accounting software” below.
• Our email provider delivers messages we send, and holds what is in them for as long as it takes to deliver them.
• Our telephony provider connects calls and text messages and holds the call metadata and, where recording is switched on, the recording.
• Our speech-to-text provider (OpenAI) receives the recording of a recorded call, to transcribe it and suggest a note of what was agreed. A person on our staff reviews every suggestion before it is saved, and the provider does not train its models on what it receives.
• Our file storage provider holds uploaded documents. Links to a file are signed and expire within minutes.
• Our hosting and database providers, who hold the records described above on our behalf.
• A browser push service, for staff who have switched on notifications. It carries the notification, not the account record.
• Professional advisers, auditors and, where we are required to, a court, a regulator or law enforcement.

Each of these acts on our instructions under a written agreement, except where they are receiving information because the law requires it.

Video meetings run in the public Jitsi Meet service (meet.jit.si). When you join one from an invitation, your audio, video and connection details go to that service, under its own privacy terms. We send it nothing from our records: the room’s name is random and says nothing about you or the account.

Calls to and from us may be recorded. Where recording is switched on, the recording is announced at the start of the call before anything else is said, and you may ask us not to record — we will either stop or call you back on a line that does not. We keep a recording as part of the contact record for the account it belongs to, for the same period as the rest of that record. A recorded call is also transcribed by our speech-to-text provider, and the transcript is kept with the recording for the same period.

We also record who we called, when, how long the call lasted and what was said afterwards, whether or not the call itself was recorded. If you tell us not to contact you at a number, or at all, that instruction is recorded against your details and honoured from that moment.

A client can choose to be paid by bank transfer, and we connect our own bank account to match the payments that arrive in it. Both use Plaid Inc. to sign in to the bank. You sign in to your bank in Plaid’s window: your bank username and password go to Plaid and never reach us.

Plaid gives us the account’s name, its type, the last four digits of its number and a token that lets us send payouts to it (or, for our own account, read its deposits). We store the token encrypted, use it only for that purpose, and never show it to anyone. We never receive or store the full account number.

Before the bank sign-in opens we ask you to confirm it is you with two-step verification, and to agree to these terms. We keep a record of that agreement: who agreed, when, and which version of this policy was in force. How Plaid itself handles your information is set out in Plaid’s End User Privacy Policy.

You can remove a linked account at any time from the Payouts page in the client portal, or ask us to. Removing it revokes Plaid’s access straight away, and no payout is sent to it again.

A client can connect its QuickBooks Online or Xero books so that past-due invoices come to us from there instead of being typed in. You sign in on Intuit’s or Xero’s own page; your accounting password never reaches us. The provider then gives us a token, which we store encrypted and never show to anyone.

With it we read two things: invoices that have a balance owing (number, dates, amounts and a short description) and, for each, who owes it as your books record them (business name, contact name, email, phone and postal address). From Xero we ask for read-only permissions. QuickBooks Online offers no read-only permission, so its consent screen describes broader access than we use: our software only ever reads, and has no code path that creates, changes or deletes anything in a company file. We never read bank, payroll, employee, vendor or expense records.

Nothing is placed with us from your books without your say-so: either you choose the invoices on the Place page, or you set rules and we send what matches, with an approval step unless you turn it off. An invoice you decline is not offered again.

You can disconnect at any time from the Place page in the client portal, or from inside QuickBooks or Xero. Disconnecting revokes the token with the provider and deletes our copy of it the same day. Invoices already placed stay with us as placements, with the same retention as any other placement; invoices that were offered but never placed are kept only as the fact that they were offered or declined.

An account record — the invoices, the contact timeline, the payments and the audit log — is kept for as long as the placement is live and then for as long as we may need it to answer for how the debt was collected. That is deliberately longer than the collection itself: the timeline is the evidence that a dispute was logged on the day it was raised, that contact stopped when it was told to, and that money was applied where it was meant to go.

Financial records are never hard-deleted. A payment that was taken and then reversed stays on the record as both facts, because a payment that existed and was undone is a different thing from a payment that never happened. Where a record is withdrawn from active collection it is marked as withdrawn rather than erased.

A linked bank account’s access is revoked at Plaid when the account is removed, and automatically 90 days after we stop working for the client it belongs to. Deposits read from our own bank that never became a payment are deleted after 2 years; for the ones that did, the bank’s full detail is trimmed after the same period and the summary stays with the payment record. Records of agreement to these terms are kept for 7 years.

An inquiry sent through the home-page form is emailed to us and kept with our correspondence. Our managers are also shown it as a notification in the system, with your name, company, email address and phone number; each is deleted when they dismiss it, or once it has been read and is 90 days old. An inquiry is not added to any account record.

Access is by named account only, with a role that determines what each person can see, and every client contact is limited to their own company’s accounts. All traffic to this site is encrypted in transit, and the database and file storage are encrypted at rest; bank and accounting-software access tokens are encrypted a second time, field by field, with a key held only by the running application. Changes to records are written to an audit log with the person who made them. Links we email — a payment page, an agreement to sign — carry a single-purpose random token, are rate-limited, expire, and can be revoked. Uploaded files are reached only through short-lived signed links. No system is perfect, and we would rather say that than claim otherwise.

• Tell you what we hold about you and where we got it.
• Correct it. If a name, a title or a phone number is wrong, tell us and we will fix it. A client portal contact can correct their own name, role and direct line on their profile page without asking us.
• Stop contacting you — at a particular number, by a particular method, or entirely. We honour that against your details from the moment we receive it. Note that it stops us contacting you; it does not by itself settle or remove a debt.
• Dispute the balance. If you believe a demand is wrong, say so and say why. Every payment page carries a form for exactly this, a collector reads it before any further contact is made, and the date you raised it is recorded.
• Ask for the paper. You are entitled to see what the figure is based on. Invoice copies we hold are downloadable from the payment page we sent you; if we hold nothing, we will ask our client for it.
• Ask us to delete it, which we will do where we are not required to keep it. We will tell you plainly when we are, and why.

Write to the address at the foot of this page. We answer within a reasonable period and, where we need to, ask you for enough information to be sure we are talking to the right person — we will not hand an account record to somebody because they knew an invoice number.

When this text changes, the date at the top of the page changes with it. We do not apply a change retroactively to make something we have already done acceptable.

See also our terms of use, which govern this website and the client portal.