SmartBills

Delete your SmartBills account

Last updated 29 September 2026

SmartBills is published by Bushveld Technologies (Pvt) Ltd, Harare, Zimbabwe. This page explains how to ask us to delete your account and the personal information held with it, what we delete, and what we are obliged to keep.

How to request deletion

1. Send us an email Write to bushveld.engineers@gmail.com with the subject Account deletion request — SmartBills.
   Email a deletion request
2. Tell us who you are Include your SmartBills username, the institution or branch you work at, and the e-mail address or telephone number on the account. If you are a customer rather than a member of staff, give the telephone number you gave at the counter and the date of the payment instead.
3. We confirm it is really you We reply within 7 days. For a staff account we also confirm the request with your institution's administrator, because they issued the account. We never delete an account on an unverified request.
4. We delete what we can, and tell you what we kept Deletion is completed within 30 days of verification. We write back naming exactly what was removed and what had to be retained, and why.

Your institution's administrator can also disable your access immediately from inside SmartBills, which stops you being able to sign in. That is not the same as deletion, and it does not remove your personal information — for that, send the email above.

What is deleted

Once a request is verified, the following are permanently removed:

Information	What happens
Your name, username, work e-mail address and telephone number	Deleted
Your password hash, authenticator secret and recovery codes	Deleted
Your sessions and sign-in tokens	Deleted, and every device signed out
Your device's notification token and biometric preference	Deleted
Saved customer contact details you entered, where no payment was completed	Deleted
Diagnostic and error logs mentioning you	Deleted, or the identifying part removed

What we have to keep, and for how long

Zimbabwean record-keeping rules for payment businesses require a completed payment and the trail behind it to be retained. We cannot delete those on request, and neither can your employer.

Information	Why it is kept	For how long
Completed transaction records — the bill account or meter number, the amount, the currency and the date	They are the financial record of a payment made to a utility on a customer's behalf	7 years from the date of the transaction
The audit trail entry showing which account performed each action	A financial audit trail that could be edited or emptied would not be an audit trail	7 years from the date of the action
The record of your deletion request itself	To show we acted on it, if we are ever asked	7 years

Within those records your name is replaced by your user identifier as soon as the account is deleted, so the retained entries no longer carry your personal details. At the end of the seven-year period the records are destroyed on a rolling basis without any further request from you.

If you are a customer, not a member of staff

If you paid a bill at a SmartBills counter, we hold the telephone number you gave for the receipt and the name the utility returned for the account you paid. You may ask for those to be deleted using the same email address above. The payment record itself is kept for the seven years described above, as the law requires.

What we never held in the first place

• No card numbers. Card payments go to the licensed payment provider and are never written to our records.
• No location data, contacts, photos or files.
• No advertising identifiers. We do not profile anyone and sell nothing to anybody.

Contact

Bushveld Technologies (Pvt) Ltd
Harare, Zimbabwe
bushveld.engineers@gmail.com

See also our privacy policy.