Hi, not sure if this is the right place to post this but hopefully someone can help.
I was working for a company that provided a bookkeeping service (I was solely responsible for that side of the business) but have since left as I was made redundant and the company is no longer offering the service and just concentrating on admin.
Some of my clients have decided to stay with me and I am still working with the same accountant. The remaining 3 have either stopped trading or have moved accountants.
Anyway the company I worked for wrote to the clients and asked them to pick up their accounts paperwork as they were no longer providing a bookkeeping service which the clients have now passed on to me. I have a Sage backup of one of the clients accounts which the company is demanding I give to them as they legally need to keep it for 6 years. This client has asked me to do their bookkeeping and I am not sure whether I need to give them a copy of the backup or not.
If you were working for the company offering the service then the data does not, nor never did, belong to you and you have no right to have it or use it.
Think about it, that business paid you to service their client and now you have their data making a profit from it.
However!
The accountant had a right to have it and whilst there is a murky area over what they are allowed to do with the data that was passed to them, as they are working for the clients they could pass their data derived from that supplied (basically your data by any other name) to you for you to continue the work on the clients behalf on a sub contract basis.
At he end of the day you are not giving up the backup you are passing back data that you should have never had but you are also rteceiving a copy of the data from the accountant so that you are able to continue working for the client. (Thats the story to stick to).
Kind regards,
Shaun.
p.s. strickly speaking the acccountant had no ownership of the underlying data either but the above seems to me the best approach.
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Shaun
Responses are not meant as a substitute for professional advice. Answers are intended as outline only the advice of a qualified professional with access to all relevant information should be sought before acting on any response given.
I was employed by the company I was also a Director and share holder so I was a bit confused.
So if that is the case does the data belong to the company I worked for or the client?
My understanding is that book-keeping data is normally owned by the book-keeper doing the work, as long as the software used to produce it belongs to that book-keeper (ie it does not belong to the client, which is why when a client leaves you the minimum you have to supply them with is a Trial Balance and not the calculations behind it). In your case the legal entity providing the book-keeping was a Limited company, rather than you. Even if you owned the Limited Company 100% you are still an employee (although obviously if you owned it 100% your Limited company could give you personally the relevant permissions to use the data). You say you were made redundant - are you still a shareholder? If you are and have enough shares you could create an agreement at the next Board meeting perhaps. Besides it sounds like they are only asking for a backup rather than demanding you return ALL data, so therefore allowing you to continue to use it. If not - follow Shaun's suggestion.
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Joanne
Winner of Bookkeeper of the Year 2015, 2016 & 2017
Thoughts are my own/not to be regarded as official advice,which should be sought from a suitably qualified Accountant.
You should check out answers with reference to the legal position
