Data Retention & Deletion

Your data, your control · UK GDPR compliant

You control your data. This policy explains how long we keep your data, how you can export it, and how to request deletion. We comply fully with UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018.

1. How Long We Keep Your Data

Data Type	Retention Period	Reason
Active account data	While your subscription is active	To provide the service
Cancelled account data	30 days after cancellation	Grace period for data export
Child records	Until you delete them or close your account	You are the data controller for children's data
Payment records	7 years	Legal requirement for tax and accounting
Invoice records	7 years	HMRC requirements
Audit logs	12 months	Security and compliance monitoring
Contact form submissions	24 months	Customer support and communication

2. Your Right to Export

Before cancelling, you can export all your data at any time:

Child data export — Download all child records, attendance, incidents, and observations as a ZIP file
Financial export — Download income and expense records as CSV
Invoice export — Download all invoices as PDF
Inspection pack — Generate a complete Care Inspectorate-ready pack

3. Your Right to Deletion

Under UK GDPR, you have the right to erasure (the "right to be forgotten"). You can request deletion at any time:

Self-service deletion — Delete individual child records, photos, or documents from your dashboard
Full account deletion — Email hello@childminderpro.com with your account email and we will delete all your data within 30 days
Confirmation — We will email you to confirm deletion has been completed

Important: Once deleted, data cannot be recovered. We recommend exporting your records before requesting deletion. Payment records required by law will be retained for the statutory period but anonymised.

4. Your Legal Obligations as a Scottish Childminder

⚠️ Important — Scottish Childminder Legal Requirement: As a registered childminder in Scotland, you are legally required to retain certain records for a minimum of 3 years after a child leaves your care. This obligation exists regardless of whether you continue using ChildMinderPro.

The Care Inspectorate (Scotland) and Scottish Government guidance require childminders to keep records including:

Attendance and care records for each child
Accident, incident, and medication records
Contracts and parental consent forms
Risk assessments and policies
Child protection records (which may have longer retention requirements)

Before cancelling your ChildMinderPro subscription, you must ensure you have exported and securely stored all records you are legally obliged to retain. You can do this from your dashboard before cancelling:

Download a full Care Inspectorate Inspection Pack for each child
Export all attendance, observations, and incident records as a ZIP file
Download all signed contracts and consent forms

After cancellation, your data remains accessible for 30 days so you can complete your export. After this grace period, all records are permanently deleted from our servers. It is your responsibility to ensure you have retained records as required by law before this window closes.

5. Children's Data

You are the data controller for children's information you enter into ChildMinderPro. We act as a data processor. This means:

You decide what data to enter and how long to keep it
You can delete a child's record at any time from your dashboard
When you delete a child's record, it is permanently removed from our database within 24 hours
We never use children's data for any purpose other than providing your childcare management service

6. Parent Data

Parent contact details are stored only for the purpose of providing the Parent Portal. Parents do not have a separate account with us — their access is tied to your childminder account. When you delete a child record, associated parent contact details are also deleted.

7. Anonymised Data

We may retain anonymised, aggregated data for statistical and service improvement purposes. This data cannot be traced back to any individual child, parent, or childminder.

8. Contact Us

For any data retention or deletion requests, please contact:

Email: hello@childminderpro.com
Postal: We Build Logic Ltd, Scotland, UK
ICO Registration: ZC059077