Client privacy
Client engagement notes carry names: the person who commissioned a piece of work, and the people whose everyday working practice that work goes on to examine. Set out below are the categories SB Consultancy Services Ltd writes down, the reason each one exists, the point at which it is destroyed, and the route for putting a question to the practice about any of it.
First contact — the message you send
An approach to the practice carries whatever you have put into it: the name at the foot of the message, the organisation on whose behalf you are writing, the address it arrived from, and your own account of the situation prompting it. An exchange that closes without work being agreed survives as that exchange alone, and is cleared from our correspondence once the matter has plainly finished.
Engagement files — the material that accumulates
Once work is agreed a file begins to gather: the scope we settled on, the correspondence running alongside it, the documents and figures the client hands over for examination, our own working notes, and the report that closes the matter. Material passed to us for review commonly carries personal information about a client's own staff, customers and suppliers. That material sits in the file under the client's instruction, serves the engagement it was supplied for, and expires with it.
Interviews — how a source is recorded
Most of what a review turns up comes from the people who operate a process; those who describe it from above account for much less. Our notes name the person who said a thing, because a finding has to be traceable to its origin before it can be defended. The report that reaches the client generally carries the observation and leaves the individual unnamed, which is precisely what allows people to be candid with us. A client who asks to be told who said what receives an explanation of that practice.
Grounds — the reasons the practice holds it
Enquiries are answered, engagements are carried out, reports are written to a standard the practice can stand behind, fees are invoiced, and the statutory records a company must maintain are maintained. Those activities rest on the engagement agreement itself, on the practice's legitimate interest in running an advisory business and keeping a defensible account of the advice it has given, and on the obligations attaching by law to a company's accounts and filings.
Confidence — the boundary around a client's material
Everything gathered for an engagement belongs to that engagement and stays within it, feeding the report written for that one client. Where the practice names an organisation as a client, that naming rests on the organisation's own agreement, given in writing beforehand.
Retention — the point a file is destroyed
An engagement file remains with the practice while the advice inside it stands open to challenge, and is destroyed once that window has run its course. Fee and accounting entries follow the term the Companies Acts set for a company's accounting records, and are disposed of at the end of it. Draft notes overtaken by the final report travel with the file rather than surviving on their own.
Access — the people who read a file
Within the practice, the person conducting the engagement. Beyond it, the accountant preparing our accounts sees the fee entries, and our insurers and professional advisers see a matter at the point one is referred to them. A public authority receives what a legal duty obliges the practice to hand over. Each of those recipients acts on our instruction, for the single purpose that put the file in front of them.
These pages — how the site behaves
Every page here is a fixed file, served exactly as it stands. The stage selector on the main page runs from what your browser has already downloaded, and the practice comes to know you at the moment you decide to send a message.
Your entitlements — what you may require of us
Data protection law hands you a set of entitlements over information describing you: to be shown it, to have an inaccuracy put right, to have it deleted once the practice's reason for holding it has expired, to have its use narrowed while a dispute about it remains open, to receive it in a form that carries across to another organisation, and to object where our ground is legitimate interest. An engagement file held back because the advice within it may still be tested will be identified as such in our reply. Where the information reached us inside a client's own material, that client stays responsible for it and your request is forwarded to them.
Raising something — where to write
Address anything on this page to clients@sbconsultancy.work, or by post to the registered office printed below. SB Consultancy Services Ltd — a company registered in England & Wales, number 14121344 — answers for the information described here. Should our response leave the matter unresolved, the Information Commissioner's Office supervises this area throughout the United Kingdom.
SB Consultancy Services Ltd19 Greenfield Way
Harrow
Middlesex
HA2 6HU
United Kingdom