PAIA Manual
Last updated 2026-08-27
This manual is published under section 51 of the Promotion of Access to Information Act 2 of 2000 (PAIA), read with the Protection of Personal Information Act 4 of 2013 (POPIA). It tells you who to ask when you want a record of the information myClerkBook holds, what those records are, how long we have to answer, and where the law draws its lines.
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Why this manual exists
PAIA gives every person the right of access to information held by a public or private body where exercising or protecting that right requires it. Section 51 requires every private body to publish a manual stating what records it holds, who its Information Officer is, and how a request is made.
Since the POPIA provisions came into force, this manual is also where the access rights you have over your own personal information meet the request procedure: if what you want is your own personal information, the route below reaches it, and your rights under POPIA and, where applicable, the GDPR are set out in full in the Privacy Policy.
The Information Officer
myClerkBook is operated from South Africa and is the responsible party for personal information under POPIA. Its head is its founder, who acts as myClerkBook's Information Officer for the purposes of PAIA and POPIA.
Every request under this manual goes to the same address the Privacy Policy gives for privacy matters:
- Email: legal@myclerkbook.com — this is the address to use, and it is answered by us directly.
- Post: myClerkBook, 90 William Campbell Drive, La Lucia, Umhlanga, Durban, 4051, South Africa.
Categories of records held
The categories below mirror what the product actually holds today, described in the Privacy Policy in detail. There is no category here that exists only in principle.
| Category | What it holds | Where it lives |
|---|---|---|
| Identity and account records | Your first and last name, username, email address, and any phone number you set, plus authentication metadata such as session tokens. | With Clerk, our authentication processor. |
| Financial records | Everything you record: dashboards, transactions including recurring and trial entries, groups, widget and insight configurations, and generated insight findings. | In Supabase PostgreSQL, protected by row-level security. |
| Billing records | Your plan, subscription status and order metadata. Card numbers never reach us; Polar, our merchant of record, holds the payment and tax record. | With Polar and in our subscription tables. |
| Usage analytics | Pseudonymous page-view and interaction events, retained 90 days, with no name, email or monetary amount attached. | With PostHog, in your browser. |
| Technical logs | Request logs and error traces from hosting, used for operational diagnosis, plus a webhook delivery ledger retained 90 days. | With Vercel and Supabase. |
| Deletion reconciliation records | A record that an account was deleted and its erasure propagated to each provider. This survives the account itself, because it is the proof erasure happened. | In our own database. |
Records are held on our behalf by the processors named in the Privacy Policy — among them Clerk, Supabase, Vercel, Polar, PostHog, Resend and Loops — each bound by a data processing agreement. A request may therefore involve a record stored with one of them; the request itself still comes to us.
How to request a record
Write to legal@myclerkbook.com, or post to the address above. Email is sufficient; the Information Regulator's prescribed request form is available on its website and we will accept your request in that form or in plain writing.
- Your identity and contact details, and enough for us to verify you if the record concerns your personal information.
- Particulars of the record you want — enough to identify it, not a perfect citation.
- The right you are exercising or protecting, and why access to the record is required for it.
- The form of access you prefer: a copy sent electronically, or inspection where a physical record exists.
- Your preferred language, if not English.
If you ask for your own personal information, say so — that request is handled as a data-subject request under POPIA, which is faster and free. We do not charge for it, ever.
Timelines and fees
We will respond within 30 days of receiving a request that contains the particulars above. Where a request is unusually large or complex, the Act allows a single extension of up to a further 30 days, and we will tell you within the first 30 days that we have taken it and why.
We will either give you the record, tell you where to find it, or give you written grounds for refusing it. You are told of any applicable fee before we proceed; fees, where they apply at all, follow the schedule prescribed under PAIA by the Information Regulator, covering reproduction and posting rather than the asking. Requests for your own personal information carry no fee.
When access may be refused
Chapter 4 of Part 3 of PAIA sets out the grounds on which a private body may refuse a request. In summary, and without limiting them, these include:
- Records whose disclosure would unreasonably disclose the personal information of someone other than you.
- Commercial, financial or technical information of a third party, supplied in confidence.
- Information privileged from production in legal proceedings.
- Records whose disclosure would endanger a person's safety or property.
- Requests that are frivolous, vexatious, or aimed at an unreasonable purpose.
Where we refuse, the refusal states the ground and the clause it rests on. If you disagree with a refusal, you may complain to the Information Regulator or approach a court. The Regulator is at JD House, 27 Stiemens Street, Braamfontein, Johannesburg 2001, or enquiries@inforegulator.org.za.
Availability of this manual
This manual is available free of charge on this page, and a copy may be requested from the Information Officer at the address above in the same way as any record. It is revised whenever the categories of records we hold change materially, and the date at the top of this page reflects the last revision.