Privacy notice

Last updated 6 August 2026

LKM Software Ltd makes CarDealerIQ, software UK car dealers use to run their forecourt. This page says what personal data passes through it, why, how long we keep it and what you can ask us to do.

There are two different relationships here, and which one you are in decides who you should be talking to. If you sign in to CarDealerIQ, we decide what happens to your data and the duties below are ours. If you bought a car from a dealer who uses CarDealerIQ, they decide what happens to your data — we only hold it for them, and the section on that is further down.

If you use CarDealerIQ

For everything in this section we are the controller. We collected it, we decided what it is for, and you can hold us to it.

Your CarDealerIQ account

People who work at a subscribing dealership and sign in.

What we hold: Email address
Password (stored only as a hash, by Supabase Auth — we never see it)
Name and initials
Job role and which site you work at
Which organisation you belong to, and your role in it
What for: To sign you in, to show you only your dealership's data, and to attribute work to the person who did it.
Why we are allowed to: Article 6(1)(b) — performing the contract between us and your dealership.
How long: For as long as the dealership subscribes, and 30 days after it ends.Applied by hand when an account closes, rather than by a scheduled job.

Security and audit records

Anyone who signs in, exports a file or changes a setting.

What we hold: Who acted, what they did and when
The record affected, and which fields changed
Sign-in and sign-out events
What for: To show a dealership who changed what, and to investigate a security incident. It is append-only: nobody, including us, can amend or delete an entry.
Why we are allowed to: Article 6(1)(f) — our legitimate interest, and the dealership's, in a trustworthy record of who did what.
How long: 24 months.

Billing records

The person who sets up and pays for a subscription.

What we hold: Name, billing email and billing address
The Stripe customer and subscription identifiers
What was charged, and when
What for: To take payment, and to keep the accounting records the law requires.
Why we are allowed to: Article 6(1)(b) for taking payment, and Article 6(1)(c) — a legal obligation — for keeping the records.
How long: Six years after the end of the accounting period, which is what HMRC requires of VAT records.Applied by hand when an account closes, rather than by a scheduled job.

Contact form enquiries

Anyone who fills in the form on our website.

What we hold: Name and email address
Dealership name and rough stock size, if given
The message itself
What for: To reply to you.
Why we are allowed to: Article 6(1)(f) — our legitimate interest in answering someone who has asked us a question.
How long: 12 months after we reply, or 12 months after you sent it if we never did.

If you are a dealership’s customer

For everything in this section we are the processor. The dealership decided to collect it and decides what it is for; we hold it on their instruction and do nothing else with it. We do not sell it, we do not use it to train anything, and we do not combine one dealership’s records with another’s.

So if you want your record corrected or deleted, ask the dealership rather than us. They hold the relationship and the lawful basis, and they can act on it immediately. If we did it directly we would be changing their records on the word of someone we cannot identify. Tell us anyway if you are getting nowhere — we can and will chase them.

A dealership's own customer records

People who buy a car from, or make an enquiry to, a dealership using CarDealerIQ.

What we hold: Name, email address and telephone number
Town and postcode
Enquiries, appointments and notes recorded by the dealership
Deals, part-exchanges, finance details and invoices
Whether they agreed to marketing
What for: To provide the dealership with the system they use to run their business. We do not use it for anything of our own, and we never sell it or use it to train anything.
Why we are allowed to: The dealership's to establish, not ours. They are the controller; we act only on their instructions.
How long: For as long as the dealership keeps it, and 30 days after their subscription ends.Applied by hand when an account closes, rather than by a scheduled job.

Vehicle history lookups

Whoever a looked-up vehicle belongs to — usually a part-exchange customer or an auction seller.

What we hold: Registration or VIN, entered by the dealership
What the DVLA and DVSA return about that vehicle: MOT results, recorded mileages, tax and type-approval data
What for: To let a dealer check a car's history before buying it. A registration is data about a vehicle, but it identifies a person often enough that we treat the lookup as personal data rather than argue the point.
Why we are allowed to: The dealership's to establish. We perform the lookup on request.
How long: Cached briefly to avoid repeat calls, then discarded. The audit entry recording that a lookup happened is kept for 24 months.

Who else touches it

These are our sub-processors: companies that handle personal data on our behalf so the product can work. We stay responsible for what they do with it. Where a service sits outside the UK, the safeguard that makes the transfer lawful is named.

Who	What for	What reaches them	Where
Supabase	The database, sign-in, file storage and the emails that confirm an address.	Everything in the register above.	London, United Kingdom (AWS eu-west-2)
Vercel	Hosting. Runs the application itself and serves every page.	Whatever is on the page being rendered, in transit. Request logs hold IP addresses and URLs.	London, United Kingdom (lhr1)
Stripe	Payments and subscriptions.	Billing name, email and address. Card details go straight to Stripe and never reach us.	United States, with processing in the EU and UK
Auto Trader	Stock adverts, valuations and market data.	Vehicle and advert data. No customer record is ever sent — the integration carries stock, not people.	United Kingdom
DVLA and DVSA	Vehicle tax, type-approval and MOT history lookups.	A registration or VIN the dealership typed in. Nothing about the person is sent.	United Kingdom

Transfers outside the UK

Stripe — Standard Contractual Clauses with the UK International Data Transfer Addendum, under Stripe's data processing agreement.

How it is kept safe

Every dealership’s data is separated in the database itself, by row-level security, rather than by the application remembering to filter — so a bug in a screen cannot show one dealer another’s stock. Traffic is encrypted in transit and the database is encrypted at rest. Credentials for third-party services are sealed with AES-256-GCM before they are stored, and the secret half is never sent back to a browser.

Changes to settings, staff and access are written to an append-only audit log that records who acted and when. Nobody can amend or delete an entry, including us. Card details never reach our servers at all: paying takes you to a page hosted by Stripe.

Your rights

Under the UK GDPR you can ask for a copy of your data, ask us to correct it, ask us to delete it, ask us to restrict what we do with it, object to processing we do on the basis of legitimate interests, and ask for your data in a portable form. You will never be charged for asking, and we will answer within one month.

Email hello@lkmsoftware.com. If your data is in a dealership’s records rather than ours, see the section above — asking them is faster, and it is the only route that does not require us to change their records on an unverified request.

If you are not satisfied with how we answer, you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office. We would rather you came to us first, but you do not have to.

Cookies, and telling you about changes

Cookies have their own page, because the rules about them are different ones. The short version is that we set two, both strictly necessary, and there is no analytics or advertising on this site at all.

If we change how any of this works we will update this page and, where the change is one that affects you materially, tell you rather than waiting for you to notice. Adding a sub-processor is such a change: a dealership can object, and objecting is only possible if you know.

Asking us

LKM Software Ltd (registered in England and Wales, no. 15805131, West Midlands, United Kingdom) is the controller for the data described in the first section. Email hello@lkmsoftware.com about anything on this page.

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