Terms of Service

Who these terms are between

These terms are between CaribNexus AI, a company based in Montego Bay, Saint James, Jamaica, founded in 2024 by Dominic A.R. Waite (“we”, “us”), and the business or accounting practice holding the account (“you”). They take effect when you first use CaribBooks or complete sign-up, whichever is earlier.

Two kinds of customer, one set of terms. A business uses CaribBooks to keep its own books. An accounting practice uses it to keep books on behalf of its clients. Everything below applies to both unless a clause says otherwise; section 7 exists because the second arrangement puts a third party’s data in our hands and that needs saying out loud.

Our privacy policy forms part of these terms. Where the two documents touch the same subject, such as retention or deletion, the privacy policy is the fuller statement and is the one to rely on.

What CaribBooks is, and is not

What it is. CaribBooks is a bookkeeper and financial administrator that works over WhatsApp. You send it a photograph of a receipt, a voice note about a payment, or a line of text. It records the transaction, asks when something does not add up, issues the quotation, invoice or receipt that goes with it, chases what is owed, and produces the reports an accountant would expect. The conversation is the interface.

What it is not. This matters more than the sentence above, so it is stated flatly. CaribBooks is not an accountant, not an auditor, and not a tax agent. It does not give accounting, tax, legal or financial advice, it does not file anything with any revenue authority on your behalf, and it does not sign off on anything. It is a tool you operate. The books remain yours, and so does responsibility for them.

It does not replace your accountant. If anything, it is built to make that relationship cheaper: a practice that receives a clean, current ledger spends its time on judgement rather than on data entry. A business using CaribBooks without an accountant is making that choice on its own assessment, not on our recommendation.

Two structural facts worth knowing before you rely on it. A posted transaction cannot be deleted by the agent — reversing one leaves both entries in the ledger, so the audit trail stays whole. And each business is a separate partition, with no means for the agent to name another.

Your account, and who may use it

An account belongs to a business, not to a person. Within it, two kinds of access exist and they are not the same thing.

Anyone on that list can post to your ledger. CaribBooks authenticates the number, not the human holding the handset. If a phone is lost, sold, or passes to a former employee, remove the number from your dashboard immediately — until you do, whoever has it can instruct CaribBooks as you. We are not able to tell the difference and do not accept responsibility for entries made by a number you left authorised.

You are responsible for everything done under your account, by your staff or by anyone you permitted. Tell us promptly at admin@caribnexusai.com if you believe your account or a registered number has been compromised.

You must be at least 18 and have authority to bind the business you are signing up. CaribBooks is a business product and is not offered to consumers or to children.

What you are responsible for

The accuracy of what you send. CaribBooks records what it is given. A receipt photographed so the total is illegible, a voice note naming the wrong supplier, or a figure typed with a digit missing will produce an entry that is wrong in exactly that way. We do not independently verify your source documents and have no means of doing so.

Reviewing what comes back. Section 5 says this at length. In short: CaribBooks’ entries and documents are drafts for you to check, and the obligation to check them is yours.

The right to share what you share. When you send us a customer’s name, a supplier’s bank details or an employee’s pay, you confirm you are entitled to. Where an accounting practice sends a client’s records, section 7 applies.

Your own legal obligations. Filing returns, keeping statutory records, paying what you owe and meeting the requirements of the Jamaica Data Protection Act or any other law that applies to you remain yours. CaribBooks helps you do them. It does not do them for you and does not know whether you have.

AI output, and the limits of it

CaribBooks is built on large language models, and they are wrong sometimes. Not often, and less often than the alternative it usually replaces, which is a shoebox of receipts and a weekend in March. But a system that reads a blurred photograph and decides which account a cost belongs to is making a judgement, and a judgement can be mistaken in ways that look entirely ordinary on the page.

So, clearly: every entry CaribBooks posts, every figure it extracts and every document it drafts is a draft for your review. It is not verified, not checked by a human at CaribNexus AI, and not warranted to be correct. Treat it as you would work handed to you by a competent and fast junior: useful, usually right, and never filed without a look.

It is not advice. Nothing CaribBooks says is accounting, audit, tax, legal, investment or financial advice, including when it answers a direct question, suggests a categorisation, or produces a report that looks authoritative. Where the answer matters — a return, a filing, a disclosure, a decision with money behind it — take it to a qualified professional in your jurisdiction.

You remain the author of your books. If an entry is miscategorised and flows into a return, the return is yours and the error is yours to correct. This is not us disclaiming a defect; it is the ordinary position of anyone who uses a tool to prepare their own records, and it is the same position you occupy using a spreadsheet.

We do not train models on your books. That is a privacy commitment and it is stated in full in section 6 of the privacy policy.

Documents issued under your name

On the Micro tier and above, CaribBooks issues quotations, invoices and receipts. These go out under your business name, with your logo, your address and your payment details, to your customer.

They are your documents. You are the issuer, we are the instrument. The prices, the terms, the tax treatment and the obligation they create between you and your customer are yours; so is the consequence of sending one that is wrong. A document number, once issued, is burned and not reused — that is a deliberate property of the ledger, and it means a document sent in error is corrected by issuing a credit or a replacement, not by pretending the first never existed.

CaribBooks will refuse to issue certain documents rather than guess: an invoice with no payment details on file, a tax rate nobody has confirmed, a price with hidden precision. Those refusals are a feature, and working around one by supplying a figure you have not checked puts the result squarely in section 5.

Accounting practices and their clients

This section applies where you are an accounting practice, bookkeeping firm or similar, using CaribBooks to serve your own clients. It is written to satisfy the Jamaica Data Protection Act, 2020, and is intended to do the same work under the comparable regimes elsewhere in the region.

You are the controller; we are your processor. Your clients’ data is yours to govern. We process it on your documented instructions, which are the instructions implicit in your use of the product, and we do not use it for our own purposes.

This section is the written contract the Act requires. The Jamaica Data Protection Act obliges a controller who engages a processor to have an arrangement made or evidenced in writing, under which the processor acts only on the controller’s instructions and is bound by security obligations equivalent to those the Act places on the controller itself. That is what the undertakings below are, and they are given to you.

Where the data goes, and on what basis. The eighth data protection standard bars a transfer out of Jamaica unless the receiving territory affords an adequate level of protection, or an exception applies. CaribBooks runs on Amazon Web Services and reasons using third-party model providers, and there is no Jamaican cloud region behind either — so your clients’ data does leave Jamaica. Where it goes, which providers hold it and the contractual safeguards those transfers are made under are set out in the privacy policy. You are the controller, so the transfer is made on your instruction and you should satisfy yourself it is one you can lawfully give. We will give you whatever detail you need to make that assessment.

You warrant that you may share what you share. When you bring a client onto CaribBooks you confirm you have the authority and the lawful basis to have their records processed by us and by the sub-processors we name, that you have given your clients whatever notice their own law requires, and that you are registered with the Office of the Information Commissioner where the Act requires it of you. We have no relationship with your client and no way to verify any of this; we rely on you.

Elsewhere in the region. If your clients sit outside Jamaica — Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago, The Bahamas, the Cayman Islands, Guyana or the OECS states — their own data protection legislation may apply to you as controller, and the duties it places on you are not identical to Jamaica’s. The undertakings above are given in the same terms whichever regime applies, but assessing which one governs you, and registering where you must, is yours to do.

Your client is not our customer. They do not hold an account with us, cannot be billed by us and cannot instruct us directly. If your relationship with them ends, their data remains under your account until you tell us otherwise. Under the Act a person who suffers damage through a contravention claims against the controller, which is you — so the undertakings in this section are the protection you hold, and they are owed to you directly.

One practical consequence of that split, which we have deliberately built around: if your card fails, your clients keep posting. They are third parties, they cannot fix your card, and they usually do not know it failed — so cutting them off on the first decline would stop their bookkeeping mid-month over something that is usually transient. See section 9.

Your WhatsApp number

CaribBooks can work over a WhatsApp number we provide, or over a number you own and connect yourself. This section is about the second.

The number stays yours. Connecting it grants us permission to send and receive messages on it for the purpose of operating CaribBooks for you. It does not transfer it, and you can disconnect it from your dashboard at any time, which ends that permission.

Meta’s rules apply to you directly. A number on the WhatsApp Business Platform is governed by WhatsApp’s own Business Terms and Meta’s policies, and messaging charges levied by Meta for conversations on your number are billed by Meta to you, not by us. Those terms are between you and Meta. We cannot waive them, and where Meta requires us to suspend or disconnect a number — a policy breach, a quality rating falling too far, an instruction we are given — we will comply, and will tell you.

Where you keep using the number yourself. If your number is connected in a way that lets you continue to use the WhatsApp Business app alongside CaribBooks, two things follow and both have bitten people before. Messages you send by hand are yours, not ours, and will not always be visible to CaribBooks or reflected in your books. And group conversations do not reach the platform at all — anything agreed in a group is invisible to CaribBooks and will not be recorded.

You remain responsible for the messages sent from your number, including those CaribBooks sends on your instruction, and for having a lawful basis to message the people you ask it to contact.

Fees, billing and renewal

CaribBooks is sold as a monthly subscription in United States dollars, by tier. Business tiers run from Nano to Medium; practice tiers from Starter to Professional, where the transaction allowance is pooled across your clients rather than fixed per client. Current prices and allowances are published on the pricing page and are the ones that apply.

Refunds. We do not refund part-months. If you cancel, you keep the service until the period you paid for ends.

If a card fails. We do not stop your bookkeeping on the first decline, because a bank’s fraud check that clears two days later would otherwise have taken your records away in the meantime — and the transactions are yours.

Blocked posting is not deletion. Your books stay where they are and come back when payment succeeds. Section 13 governs what happens if the account closes.

We may change prices with at least 30 days’ notice by email. A change takes effect at your next renewal, and if you do not want it you may cancel before then.

Transaction capacity and fair use

Each tier includes a monthly transaction allowance. It resets at the start of each billing period and does not roll over.

If you need more, additional transactions can be bought on demand. These behave differently on purpose: purchased transactions are not cleared by the period roll. Someone who buys a hundred on the 28th and uses forty keeps the other sixty. Your plan allowance is always consumed first, so paid credits are never burned while free headroom remains.

CaribBooks warns you as you approach the limit rather than stopping without notice. If an allowance is exhausted and not topped up, posting pauses until the period rolls or you add capacity; nothing already recorded is affected.

The allowances are generous for ordinary use and are not a trap. They are there because the cost of running the system scales with volume, and a flat price with no ceiling eventually means honest customers subsidising one that is using the product as a data pipeline.

Acceptable use

You agree not to use CaribBooks to:

CaribBooks will also decline instructions of its own accord in some cases — it will not issue a document it cannot stand behind, and it will not delete a posted entry. Persistently working around those refusals is a breach of this section.

Suspension and termination

You may leave at any time. Cancel from your dashboard. The service runs to the end of the period you have paid for, and section 13 then applies.

We may suspend an account where payment has failed and the grace in section 9 has run out, where section 11 has been breached, or where we are required to by Meta, a payment provider or the law. Except where the breach is serious or we have no choice, we will tell you first and give you a reasonable chance to put it right.

We may end the agreement on 30 days’ notice, or immediately for a serious breach. If we end it for our own convenience, we will refund the unused portion of anything you have paid in advance — the exception to section 9’s no-part-refunds rule, because the decision was ours and not yours.

Suspension does not delete anything. The difference between suspension and closure is the whole subject of the next section.

Your data, during and after

Your books are yours. Not ours, and not ours to withhold. You can export your data from the dashboard while the account is live, and we will help if the export you need is not one the dashboard offers.

After closure, the accounting records are kept for ten years, then destroyed. That is deliberately above the statutory floor in Jamaica: revenue authorities can reach back further than seven years in a dispute, some practices ask for ten, and nobody should have to stay subscribed to satisfy a records request. Conversation history, reasoning traces and reminders are deleted within 30 days of closure.

The full schedule, including what is retained while an account is live and what “deletion” actually means in each store, is in the privacy policy. Where these terms and that schedule differ, the schedule governs.

A posted journal entry cannot be erased on request, because removing one side of a double entry falsifies a ledger. An erasure request against live books is met by reversal and redaction, which is explained in the privacy policy.

Availability and change

We work to keep CaribBooks available and we monitor it, but we do not offer a contractual uptime guarantee, and you should not treat it as infrastructure you can fail over to. It is provided as it is.

It depends on things we do not control. WhatsApp and Meta carry every message. Amazon Web Services runs the system. Third-party model providers do the reasoning. An outage at any of them is an outage for you, and we cannot undertake to prevent it. What we can undertake is to be honest about it when it happens.

We improve the product continuously and may change how features work. Where a change materially reduces what you are getting, we will give you reasonable notice. We will not remove your ability to export your own data.

Intellectual property

You own your data. Your transactions, documents, chart of accounts, customers, vendors, messages and logo remain yours. We claim no ownership of them and acquire no licence beyond what is needed to run the service for you and to meet our legal obligations.

We own the software. CaribBooks, its interfaces, its prompts, its models as configured, its documentation and the CaribNexus AI and CaribBooks names and marks are ours. Using the service does not transfer any of it, and nothing here grants you a licence to copy, reverse engineer or build a competing product from it.

If you send us feedback or a suggestion, we may act on it without owing you anything for it. This is not a claim on your ideas generally; it means we do not have to track whose suggestion led to which improvement.

Liability

Nothing in these terms limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited. Everything below is subject to that.

That carve-out includes data protection, and it is meant literally. Nothing here limits or excludes any right a data subject has under the Jamaica Data Protection Act, 2020 or under the comparable law of another territory, affects the Information Commissioner’s powers against either of us, or relieves us of the processor undertakings in section 7. A data subject is not a party to this contract and their statutory rights are not ours to cap. Where a court or the Commissioner finds any part of this section unenforceable, the rest of it stands.

The cap. Our total liability to you, for all claims arising in any twelve-month period, is limited to the fees you paid us in the twelve months before the claim arose.

What we are not liable for. Indirect or consequential loss; loss of profit, revenue, goodwill or anticipated savings; and — stated explicitly because it is the one that matters here — penalties, interest or assessments imposed on you by a revenue authority, and the cost of professional work to correct or restate records.

That last exclusion is the commercial substance of section 5 and we would rather be blunt about it than bury it. A subscription costing a few hundred US dollars a year cannot stand behind the tax position of a business, and any supplier who tells you otherwise has not thought about the arithmetic. The protection against a miscategorised entry reaching a return is your review of the books and your accountant’s, not this contract.

Provided as it is. To the extent the law allows, we exclude implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement. We do not warrant that CaribBooks will be uninterrupted, error-free, or that its output will be accurate.

You indemnify us against claims brought by a third party — including your own client, your customer, or a person you messaged — arising from your use of CaribBooks in breach of these terms, from data you had no right to share with us, or from a document issued under your name.

Governing law, and changes to these terms

These terms are governed by the laws of Jamaica, and the courts of Jamaica have exclusive jurisdiction. Before either of us goes to court, we each agree to raise the problem in writing and give the other 30 days to resolve it. Most things are a misunderstanding and a telephone call.

Changes. We may update these terms. Where a change materially affects your rights we will give at least 30 days’ notice by email to your registered address, and it takes effect at your next renewal. Continuing to use CaribBooks after that is acceptance. The effective date at the top of this page always reflects the current version.

If a clause is found unenforceable, the rest stands. A delay in enforcing a term is not a waiver of it. These terms, with the privacy policy, are the whole agreement between us about CaribBooks and replace anything said beforehand.