Security

Last updated July 8, 2026

Our approach

LineLedger holds your books — financial records, contacts, payroll, and tax information — so security is a core part of the product, not an afterthought.

But we do not hold them. LineLedger is free, open-source software that you install and operate on infrastructure you control. There is no hosted service, no account on our systems, and no copy of your data anywhere near us. That changes what this page can honestly promise: we are responsible for the security properties of the software, and you are responsible for the server you run it on.

Below is what the software gives you, and what remains yours to do.

What the software provides

Encryption in transit

LineLedger is designed to run behind TLS (HTTPS). Terminating TLS correctly, and keeping certificates current, is part of your deployment.

Authentication and access control

  • Passkeys (WebAuthn) and two-factor authentication are supported. We encourage you to enable them.
  • Passwords are stored only as salted hashes — never in plain text.
  • Within a company, access is role-based: owners and admins control what each team member can see and do, down to the section level.
  • API keys carry explicit abilities and per-key rate limits.

A tamper-evident audit trail

Every change to your accounting records is written to an append-only audit log, with each entry cryptographically chained to the one before it (a hash chain). This makes the record tamper-evident: after-the-fact alterations are detectable. Posted accounting entries are immutable by design. The hash chain stays verifiable across a backup and restore.

Portable backups

Any company exports to a complete, self-contained ZIP that restores in place. Nothing about your data is proprietary or locked to us.

What is yours to secure

Because you host it, these are your responsibility, not ours:

  • The server, its operating system, and its network exposure.
  • Database encryption at rest, if you require it.
  • Taking, testing, and storing backups. No backup exists unless you make one.
  • Keeping your LineLedger installation patched — watch the repository for releases.
  • Any credentials you configure for optional third-party services, such as an AI provider or a payment processor for your customer portal.
  • Your own regulatory posture: data residency, retention, and breach notification obligations attach to your installation, not to us.

We can publish good software. We cannot patch your server.

Payments

LineLedger charges you nothing, so there is no billing system and no cardholder data of yours anywhere in our world.

If you enable the customer portal so that your customers can pay your invoices online, those card payments are handled by Stripe, a PCI-DSS Level 1 certified provider, under an account you connect. Card numbers do not touch your LineLedger installation, and they certainly never touch us.

Compliance posture

We are transparent about where we stand:

  • LineLedger is not SOC 2 certified, and as an unhosted open-source project there is no service boundary for such an audit to cover. We design the software’s controls to align with industry best practice.
  • Our handling of the limited personal information this website collects is described in our Privacy Policy.
  • If you are performing a vendor review, note that the correct subject of that review is your deployment. We are happy to answer questions about the software: email [email protected].

Transparency through open source

The LineLedger application is open source under the AGPLv3. Anyone can read the exact code that keeps their books, review how it handles data, and report concerns. We consider this openness a security feature: more eyes on the code means issues are easier to find and fix — and you never have to take our word for it.

We also publish end-to-end accounting proofs with downloadable evidence and SHA-256 hashes, so the arithmetic itself is checkable against your own checkout.

Reporting a vulnerability

We welcome responsible disclosure and are grateful to researchers who help keep LineLedger safe. Please do not report security issues through public GitHub issues or social media. Instead:

Please include enough detail for us to reproduce and assess the issue. We will acknowledge your report, keep you updated, and let you know when a fix ships. We ask that you give us a reasonable opportunity to address the issue before any public disclosure, and that you test only against your own installation. Full details are in our security policy on GitHub.