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Acclipse BenchmarkIT's sophisticated encryption and anonymising techniques means you don't need to be concerned about the security and the privacy of data that enters or leaves your practice.
The Acclipse BenchmarkIT system deals with statistical information related to business performance. In order for us to be able to provide accurate benchmarks of business performance we need to gather information about individual businesses and aggregate it into a central database. This information may be commercially sensitive and as such we have taken a number of steps to ensure the information is handled appropriately.
Anonymity
A key factor in the protection of individual business information is ensuring any statistical data provided for comparisons can not be used to identify or find information on an individual business. We achieve this by ensuring data stored on our servers in the Acclipse BenchmarkIT database does not contain identifying information such as firm names, ABN numbers, addresses etc.
We keep a record of the accounting firm that supplied us with the original data. We do this to maintain data integrity and for our billing records. This information is kept internally on our servers. This information can not be retrieved from the statistical benchmarking data we provide for reporting purposes.
Geographic location
To provide standard benchmarks we retrieve information about the geographic location of the business. We store this information on our server in an internally generated code derived from the Australian Post Postcodes Database.
Industry category
To provide accurate benchmark reports we need to categorise the industry sector the business operates in. We use Australian and New Zealand Standard Industrial Classification (ANZSIC) codes for storing industry categories.
Selective production of ratios
We only make statistical benchmarking ratios available for specific industry categories or geographic locations where there is a large enough sample to ensure that an individual business can not be identified. If the sample size is too small, then the benchmark must be produced against a broader category.
Encryption
In addition to our efforts to keep data anonymous (as discussed above), we also protect any data transmitted over the Internet by using two separate systems of data encryption. Internet traffic is protected using Secure Socket Layer (SSL) encryption. This is an industry standard method for encrypting financial transactions in an online environment. We also provide a totally separate system of industry standard encryption internally in the Acclipse BenchmarkIT software that provides additional encryption of individual packages of information that are passed between the Acclipse BenchmarkIT client software and the Acclipse BenchmarkIT online server.
Data on your site
The Acclipse BenchmarkIT client software gathers and stores information such as client name and address details. This information is stored in a database at your site on your computer system in the location you specify when you set up the software (generally with your other accounting data). You are responsible for ensuring the security of this data by implementing appropriate security procedures and protocols within your organisation.
Data transmitted over the Internet to the Acclipse BenchmarkIT server
The data that leaves your site has already been processed to ensure individual businesses can not be identified from it. The data is transmitted in an encrypted form and remains encrypted while it is stored on the front end of the Acclipse BenchmarkIT server which is exposed to the Internet. A separate software process removes the encrypted data from the front end processor and decrypts it for storage in the Acclipse BenchmarkIT server database which does not have any direct connection to the Internet.
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