Sarnel is a Shopify app that generates VAT invoices for orders and emails them to the customer who placed the order. This policy explains what personal data passes through the app, what is kept, and for how long. It is written to be read, not to be survived.
The short version. Sarnel reads order data from Shopify at the moment a document is generated, produces a PDF, and emails it to the customer. It does not store customer names, addresses or email addresses afterwards. It keeps one thing about each order permanently: which invoice number was assigned to it.
01Who is responsible
Sarnel is operated by Autofy Studio (“we”), based in the Netherlands. Our full company registration details are available on request by email.
For the personal data of a merchant’s customers, the merchant who installed Sarnel is the data controller and we act as a processor on their instructions. For the merchant’s own account data, we are the controller.
Contact for any privacy question or request: admin@autofystudio.online.
02What data the app touches
| Data | Why | Kept? |
|---|---|---|
| Customer name and billing address | Required on a VAT invoice | No. Read from Shopify when a document is generated, printed into the PDF, not written to our database. |
| Customer email address | To deliver the invoice | No. Passed to our email provider for that single send and not stored in our database. Error messages from the provider are stripped of the address before being logged. |
| Order contents, amounts and tax lines | The body of the invoice | No. Read from Shopify each time. |
| Order ID and its assigned invoice number | So a number is never reissued and the sequence stays unbroken | Yes, permanently. See section 4. |
| Shop domain, shop settings, seller details you enter | To run the app and print the seller block | Yes, until you uninstall. |
| Delivery status of each invoice email | So an invoice is never emailed twice and never silently lost | Yes. This record contains no customer personal data. |
Sarnel does not request access to customer phone numbers. Access to customer name, email and address is requested from Shopify for app functionality only — not for marketing, personalisation or analytics.
03Who else processes it
Shopify — the source of all order data. Their handling is governed by Shopify’s own privacy policy.
Render — application hosting and the database, in Frankfurt, Germany.
Resend (sending from Ireland; account data and logs in the United States) — delivery of the invoice email.
These are the only third parties involved. Sarnel contains no analytics, advertising or tracking services, and we do not sell or share personal data with anyone else.
04Why invoice numbers are kept permanently
EU invoicing rules require invoice numbers to form an unbroken sequence with no number issued twice. To guarantee that, Sarnel keeps a permanent record linking each order ID to the invoice number it was given. That record survives even a full erasure request, because deleting it would allow a number that has already been printed and sent to a customer to be issued again to a different order.
The record is an order ID and a number. It contains no name, no address and no email address.
05Data protection requests from Shopify
Sarnel answers all three of Shopify’s mandatory requests:
- Customer data request — we report the customer data we hold, which is none.
- Customer redact — there is no stored customer personal data to erase.
- Shop redact — the shop’s settings and records are deleted, except the invoice-number records described in section 4, which are retained to meet a legal obligation.
06Cookies
This website sets no cookies and runs no analytics. The app itself uses only the session cookie Shopify’s own app framework requires in order to keep you signed in inside your Shopify admin.
07Your rights
Under the GDPR you may request access to your personal data, correction, erasure, restriction of processing, portability, or object to processing. If you are a customer of a shop using Sarnel, direct your request to that shop — they are the controller, and we will assist them with it. If you are a merchant, write to us directly.
You also have the right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority. In the Netherlands that is the Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens.
08Security
All traffic is encrypted in transit. Access credentials are held in the hosting platform’s secret storage and are not committed to source control. Database backups are managed by the hosting provider and stay within the European Union.
09Changes
If this policy changes materially, the date at the top changes and merchants with the app installed are notified by email.