These Terms govern use of the Seafarer Consulting LLC ("Seafarer", "we", "us") website and online client portal (the "Sea Portal"). By using them you agree to these Terms.
Your engagement letter comes first. The Portal is a way to deliver services. It does not replace your engagement letter or Statement of Work. If these Terms and your signed engagement documents conflict on services, fees, or scope, the signed documents govern.
1. Who may use the Portal
Portal accounts are created by Seafarer for named individuals at a client organization, or for Seafarer staff. There is no public sign-up, and accounts may not be shared or transferred.
You must be at least 18, authorized by your organization to access its financial records, and using our services for business rather than personal purposes.
2. Your account
You agree to:
- Complete the required security enrolment. Strong authentication is mandatory: a passkey or an authenticator app for every account, and both for Leadership accounts.
- Keep your authentication factors under your own control.
- Tell us promptly at company@seafarerconsulting.com if you believe an account has been compromised.
- Tell us when someone at your organization should no longer have access, so we can remove it.
You are responsible for activity under your account, except to the extent it results from our failure.
3. Our services and their scope
We provide bookkeeping, accounting including accounts payable and receivable, financial planning and analysis, tax preparation and planning, and fractional CFO advisory. We become your back office and prepare financial information from the records and explanations you provide.
Unless your engagement letter says otherwise in writing, our work is not an audit, review, or examination, we do not express an opinion or provide assurance on your financial statements, and we do not provide legal or investment advice. Nothing on this website creates a client relationship; that begins when an engagement letter is signed by both parties.
4. What the Portal provides
Depending on your engagement, the Portal may give you financial statements and reports drawn from your accounting records, accounts payable and receivable views, a secure document vault, messaging and tasks with your Seafarer team, meeting booking, and invoice viewing and payment.
We may change, add, or remove features. We will not materially reduce a feature your engagement depends on without telling you first.
5. Your accounting data
We read your accounting records. We never write to them. No feature of the Portal creates, edits, or deletes an entry in your books, and the system is built so that it cannot: the write operations are not merely disabled, they are not reachable from the application at all.
Where a live connection to your accounting system is enabled for your engagement, figures shown in the Portal are derived from your records as they stand when retrieved. They are a presentation of your books, not an independent verification of them. If your underlying records are wrong or incomplete, the Portal will faithfully show you the wrong figure. Where a live connection is not yet enabled, figures come from the records you provide to us.
Forecasts and projections are illustrative estimates based on assumptions you or we select. They are marked as forecasts, they are not written back to your accounting system, and they are not a promise of future results.
6. Your responsibilities
Good numbers depend on good inputs. You agree to:
- Give us complete, accurate, and timely records, statements, and explanations, and tell us when something changes.
- Review the deliverables we send and tell us promptly about anything that looks wrong.
- Keep responsibility for your own business decisions, internal controls, and the final content of filings and statements we prepare on your behalf.
- Maintain the accounts, licenses, and system access we need to do the work.
- Meet the deadlines we identify. Late or incomplete information can move a close date or a filing deadline, including a month-end close we would otherwise complete in 10 business days.
- Upload only documents you are entitled to share with us, and not upload malicious files or attempt to bypass the file checks.
- Not attempt to access another organization's data, probe the service for vulnerabilities without our written permission, interfere with its operation, scrape it, or resell access.
- Not use the Portal to store material unrelated to the services.
We check uploads and refuse anything that fails. As malware scanning is rolled out as a download gate, a file that has not passed scanning will not be downloadable by anyone.
7. Documents and records
Documents you upload remain yours. You grant us the permission needed to store, process, and display them to deliver the services.
Documents are versioned; replacing a file keeps the earlier version. Records are retained according to our published retention practice and any statutory period that applies to accounting records. See the Privacy Policy for detail.
8. Fees and payment
We work on flat-rate, transparent pricing. Your engagement letter or Statement of Work sets the fee, what is included, and the billing cycle. Any pricing shown on our website, including quote calculator estimates, is an indicative starting point and not a binding quote.
Suspending Portal access for non-payment does not by itself end your engagement.
9. Meetings and recording
Where meetings are recorded and transcribed, recording requires the agreement of the participants, and you will be told at the time. Recordings and transcripts are working records for the Seafarer team. You may ask us about a meeting at any time; transcripts themselves are internal working papers and are not routinely provided.
10. Confidentiality
Each party will keep the other's confidential information confidential and use it only to perform under these Terms and your engagement. This does not apply to information that is public through no fault of the recipient, was already lawfully known, or must be disclosed by law, in which case the recipient will give notice first where permitted. These obligations survive the end of the engagement.
11. Intellectual property
The Portal, its software, and its design are ours. These Terms grant you a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable right to use the Portal for the services during your engagement.
Your data, documents, and accounting records remain yours, and reports we prepare for you are yours to use for your own purposes once fees for them are paid. Our templates, dashboards, workflows, automation tooling, models, and methodologies remain ours, including improvements made while serving you.
The Seafarer name, ship's wheel logo, site content, and design are our property and may not be copied or used without written permission.
12. Not advice
The Portal presents information. It does not provide tax, legal, or investment advice, and nothing in it should be relied on as such. Advice comes from your Seafarer team, in the context of your engagement. Where the Portal offers a suggestion or an insight, it is a prompt for a conversation, not a recommendation.
13. Availability
We aim to keep the Portal available and secure, and to make maintenance unobtrusive. We do not guarantee uninterrupted availability, and we may take the service down for maintenance or security reasons.
The Portal depends on third-party services, including your accounting, payroll, and banking providers. Your use of those platforms is governed by their own terms, interruptions there can affect what the Portal can show, and we are not responsible for their availability or accuracy.
14. Disclaimers and liability
Except as expressly stated, the website and the Portal are provided "as is" and "as available", and we disclaim implied warranties, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement, to the extent the law allows. We do not guarantee any particular financial outcome, tax result, funding result, or cost saving; illustrative figures on our website, including automation savings percentages, describe results some clients have seen and are not promises.
Neither party is liable for indirect, incidental, special, or consequential loss, or for lost profits or lost data, arising from these Terms. Our total liability arising from the Portal is limited to the total fees you have paid us under the engagement.
Nothing here limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited, including for fraud, willful misconduct, or death or personal injury caused by negligence. These limits apply to the Portal; liability for the professional services themselves is governed by your engagement letter.
15. Indemnification
You agree to indemnify and hold us harmless from third-party claims arising out of records or instructions you provided that were inaccurate, incomplete, or unlawful, your misuse of the website or Portal, or your breach of these Terms.
16. Suspension and termination
We may suspend or terminate access if these Terms are materially breached, if required by law, or if an account presents a security risk. Where circumstances allow, we will give notice and an opportunity to put things right. You may stop using the Portal at any time, and ending Portal access does not by itself end your engagement.
On termination: we will make your documents and records available for export for 90 days after access ends. After that we delete or retain them according to our retention practice and any statutory period. Tell us before the window closes if you need an export. Sections on confidentiality, intellectual property, disclaimers, liability, and indemnification survive.
17. Changes to these Terms
We may update these Terms. For material changes we will notify Portal users at least 14 days beforehand. Continuing to use the Portal after a change takes effect means you accept it.
18. General
- If a provision is unenforceable, the rest stands.
- Failing to enforce a provision is not a waiver of it.
- You may not assign these Terms without our written consent. We may assign them to a successor of our business.
- These Terms, your engagement documents, and the Privacy Policy are the entire agreement about the Portal.