Is this actually free, or do I hit a paywall at the end?

Free. The policy is complete on this page, you can copy or download it right now, and there is no email step. The paid kit is a separate thing you can ignore.

Is this legal advice?

No. It is practical business guidance written to be usable, not a legal document. Employment and privacy law differ by country, so have your final version checked against your local law before you rely on it.

Does this replace what our professional body requires?

No. It is an internal operational policy about how staff use AI tools. Where your professional body or a client engagement letter sets confidentiality or record-keeping requirements, those govern and this sits underneath them.

Can staff use AI on anonymised client data?

That is a decision for your firm rather than something a template should make for you. The practical difficulty is that financial data anonymises poorly: remove the name and a distinctive set of figures can still identify a business to anyone who knows the sector. If you allow it, define what anonymised means in writing before someone else defines it for you.

Free generator

An AI usage policy built for an accounting practice.

Client financial records are the single most sensitive thing your staff handle, and they are exactly what someone reaches for when a reconciliation is taking too long. This writes the policy that draws the line, filled in for your firm.

No email required. No signup. Copy it, download it, use it.

Your business

Business name

Who staff ask when unsure

Who approves new AI tools

Approved tools

Tool 1

Tool 2 (optional)

Tool 3 (optional)

Settings

A breach is treated as

Reviewed every

Policy owner

Require staff to note AI use on customer-facing written work Include the bias and fairness section

AI Usage Policy

AI Usage Policy for [Business name]

A plain-language policy covering what staff may and may not do with AI tools at work. Read it, adapt anything that does not fit, then circulate it.

1. Why we have this policy

[Business name] uses AI tools because they save time and improve our work. They also carry real risks: leaking confidential or customer data, producing wrong or biased output, and creating work that nobody has checked. This policy sets out how we use AI so we get the benefit without the harm.

It applies to everyone: employees, contractors, and anyone acting on behalf of [Business name].

2. The one rule that matters most

Never put information into an AI tool that you would not email to a stranger.

If you are unsure whether something is safe to enter, it is not. Ask your manager before you proceed. Asking is always the right call and nobody will think less of you for it.

3. What you must never enter into a public AI tool

Unless the specific tool has been approved for it in writing, never enter:

Client financial records: trial balances, general ledgers, bank statements, and any export from a client's accounting system
Tax file numbers, IRD, HMRC or IRS reference numbers, and any correspondence with a revenue authority
Payroll registers, individual salary figures, and employee records held on a client's behalf
Draft or filed returns, financial statements, and working papers
Client names combined with any financial figure, even where each on its own would be harmless
Anything covered by an engagement letter's confidentiality terms
Bank account numbers, direct debit authorities, and payment details for the firm or any client

4. Approved tools

Only use AI tools on this list for work. Using an unapproved tool for work is a breach of this policy.

Tool	Approved for	Not approved for
[Tool name]	Drafting a client email, summarising a long piece of guidance, or explaining a concept in plainer words, all using no client identifiers or figures	Anything containing a client name, a figure from a client's records, or a document exported from a client system

Free consumer versions of AI tools often train on what you enter and keep it. Paid business tiers usually let you turn that off. Only approve a tool once someone has checked how it handles your data.

5. Getting a new tool approved

Want to use an AI tool that is not on the list? Do not just start using it. Send a request to the operations manager with three things: what the tool is, what you want to use it for, and what data it would touch. The operations manager will check its data handling and security before approving or declining, and approved tools are added to the table above.

6. You are accountable for what AI produces

AI makes mistakes. It invents facts, gets numbers wrong, and is often confidently incorrect.

Check everything before it leaves the business. You are responsible for any AI-assisted work you send to a customer, publish, or rely on for a decision, exactly as if you had written it yourself.
Never send AI output to a customer or an external party without a person reading it first.
Do not use AI to make final decisions about people, including hiring, firing, discipline and pay, or about anything with legal, safety, or financial consequences. AI can assist your thinking. A person decides.

7. Be honest about AI use

If a customer or a colleague asks whether something was AI-assisted, tell the truth.
Do not present AI-generated work as if it involved professional judgement that it did not.
Customer-facing written work must note where AI was used in preparing it.

8. Client confidentiality and AI

The duty of confidentiality a client relies on when they hand over their records does not narrow because a tool is convenient. Treat any AI tool that has not been approved in writing as a third party you have not told the client about, because that is what it is.

Where a client's own engagement terms or your professional body's standards impose confidentiality requirements beyond this policy, those take precedence. Check them before approving any tool that would touch client work, and record that you did.

9. Bias and fairness

AI reflects the data it was trained on and can produce biased or unfair output. Be especially careful using AI for anything involving people, and never let it be the sole basis for a decision that affects someone.

10. If something goes wrong

If you accidentally enter sensitive information into an AI tool, or you spot AI output that has caused a problem, tell your manager straight away. The point is to fix it fast, not to assign blame. Reporting something early is always treated better than a hidden problem that surfaces later.

11. Breaches

Not following this policy may be treated as a disciplinary matter under our normal procedures, because it can put the business, our customers, and our people at real risk.

Policy owner: [name and role]

Applies to: [Business name]

Version date: [date]

Review: every six months, because AI tools change fast

The risk that dominates in an accounting practice

Almost every risk in this sector reduces to one habit: pasting a client's actual numbers into a tool to save ten minutes. A trial balance, a bank statement, a payroll register, a draft tax position. It rarely feels like a data breach at the time, because the person doing it is trying to be efficient with information they are legitimately entitled to see. That is what makes it hard to police by instinct and why the policy has to name the specific artefacts rather than say 'client data'. Staff do not think of a CSV export as client data. They think of it as a spreadsheet.

The second-order problem is that accounting work is checkable and wrong answers surface late. An AI-assisted classification that is confidently incorrect does not fail loudly. It flows into a report, a return, or a set of accounts, and is found by someone else months later. So the review requirement in section 6 matters more here than the tool list does.

What this looks like in practice

A senior working on a set of accounts has 240 unclassified transactions and a deadline. The efficient move is to paste the lot into a chatbot and ask it to code them. Under this policy that is a breach, because the export carries the client's name, their suppliers, and their spending pattern.

What the policy permits instead is the version that is genuinely useful and carries no client data: describing the chart of accounts in the abstract and asking how a category of expense is usually treated, then applying the answer yourself. The time saved is smaller. The exposure is nil.

The point of writing this down is that the senior is not doing anything careless. Without a policy naming the export specifically, most people would land on the first version and never think of it again.

Why this is free

An AI policy is the first thing a business needs and the easiest thing to put off. Charging for it would just mean fewer businesses have one. Handing it over, with no email wall in front of it, is also the honest way to show you what our work is like before you spend anything.

Use it, change it, put your own letterhead on it. There is no attribution requirement and nothing to sign.

If the policy was useful

The policy is document one of nine.

A policy tells people where the line is. It does not tell you which tools to trust, where AI is actually worth using in your business, or whether any of it paid off. That is the rest of the kit.

Data governance checklist, so you know what a tool does with your data before it touches it
Tool evaluation scorecard, with two real tools compared and the better product losing
Use-case grid, seven candidates scored including the high-value one worth refusing
90-day adoption plan, with the staff announcement script and the five failure modes
ROI tracker, a worked quarter and the three challenges a sceptic always makes
Prompt libraries for finance, operations, marketing, HR and customer service

Get the full kit$149 one time, nine documents

Other versions of this policy

The same document rebuilt around a different set of risks. If none of these is you, the general version is the place to start.

Questions

Is this actually free, or do I hit a paywall at the end?: Free. The policy is complete on this page, you can copy or download it right now, and there is no email step. The paid kit is a separate thing you can ignore.
Is this legal advice?: No. It is practical business guidance written to be usable, not a legal document. Employment and privacy law differ by country, so have your final version checked against your local law before you rely on it, particularly the breaches section.
Can I edit it and put my own branding on it?: Yes. Change anything, remove sections that do not apply, add your logo. There is no attribution requirement.
Does it work outside New Zealand?: The policy is deliberately written without country-specific law in it, so the substance travels. The one part to check locally is how breaches are handled under your employment rules.
How long should an AI policy be?: Short enough that people read it. A one-page policy that staff follow beats a twenty-page document nobody opens. This one is deliberately about one page once you delete what does not apply.
How often should we update it?: Every six months is a sensible default while AI tools are changing this fast, and immediately if you approve a new tool or something goes wrong.
Does this replace what our professional body requires?: No. It is an internal operational policy about how staff use AI tools. Where your professional body or a client engagement letter sets confidentiality or record-keeping requirements, those govern and this sits underneath them.
Can staff use AI on anonymised client data?: That is a decision for your firm rather than something a template should make for you. The practical difficulty is that financial data anonymises poorly: remove the name and a distinctive set of figures can still identify a business to anyone who knows the sector. If you allow it, define what anonymised means in writing before someone else defines it for you.
Who wrote this?: Plainstart, a brand of Sypher Limited. We publish plain-language operational material for small and medium businesses adopting AI.