Terms of Use

SmartDojo (“the Service”) is a dojo-management application operated by SmartDojo, based in Japan. You can reach us at contact@smartdojo.net.

These Terms of Use govern your access to and use of everything we publish: the application at /app, the reference syllabus at /syllabus, the public site, and the API behind them. Our Privacy Policy and Cookie Policy form part of these terms.

By creating an account, joining a dojo or otherwise using the Service, you accept these terms. If you do not accept them, do not use the Service. If you accept them for a dojo, club, association or company, you confirm you are entitled to bind it, and “you” means that organisation as well.

• “Dojo” — a school you create in the Service. A dojo is its own entity: a user is not a dojo, and a user may belong to several.
• “Owner”, “Instructor”, “Student” — the role a user holds in one dojo. The role decides what that user can open in that dojo.
• “Dojo Data” — everything you or your dojo puts into the Service: members and their details, ranks and gradings, the timetable, attendance registers, memberships and dues, finance entries, documents and settings.
• “Reference syllabus” — the martial-arts reference content we publish at /syllabus (belts, techniques, katas, vocabulary). It belongs to us and is read-only.
• “The books” — the finance section of a dojo: its chart of accounts, cash book or double-entry ledger, journal entries, tax figures, reports and closings.
• “Personal data”, “controller”, “processor” — as defined in Regulation (EU) 2016/679 (GDPR), and read alongside the equivalent notions of Japan's Act on the Protection of Personal Information (個人情報保護法).

• You must be at least 12 years old to use the free Service. Any paid plan or payment feature requires you to be at least 16 — or the age of digital consent in your country, if it is higher. You must have the legal capacity to enter into this agreement, and a minor may use the Service only with the consent of a parent or guardian, given to their dojo.
• The details you register must be accurate, and you must keep them up to date.
• An account is personal. Keep your password secret, do not share the account, and tell us at once at contact@smartdojo.net if you believe someone else has used it.
• You are responsible for everything done through your account, other than use we could have prevented and did not.
• While the Service is invite-only, an invitation code is issued to a person, may not be resold or passed on, and may be withdrawn.

A dojo is created by its owner, who decides who joins it and in what role. Instructors get the mat; the books stay with the owner. Access is enforced by the Service, but the decisions behind it are the owner's.

• The owner is responsible for who is admitted to the dojo, for the role each member holds, and for the accuracy of what is recorded about them.
• The owner is responsible for having a lawful basis for the personal data their dojo records about members, and for telling those members what is recorded and why. Where we process that data on the dojo's behalf, we act as processor and the dojo as controller — see our Privacy Policy.
• Everything between a dojo and its members — fees, insurance, gradings, discipline, supervision, safety — is between them. We provide the tool and are not a party to it.
• We are not a martial-arts federation or grading authority, an insurer, an employer, an accountant or a tax adviser. We do not verify a claimed rank, affiliation, qualification or licence recorded in the Service.

The reference syllabus is published for study and reference. It is not the official syllabus of any federation, organisation, school or style, and its publication implies no affiliation with, endorsement by, or recognition from any of them. Names of arts, styles, techniques and organisations are used descriptively and remain those of their owners.

Grading, the correctness of a technique, and whether a person is fit to train or to be promoted, remain entirely the decision of the dojo and of the body it answers to. Nothing in the Service replaces a qualified instructor.

SmartDojo is not certified, approved, audited, registered or otherwise recognised accounting software in any country. We make no representation that it satisfies any statutory requirement for keeping books, issuing or storing invoices, numbering or sealing entries, archiving records, or preparing or filing returns — including, by way of example only, Japan's Electronic Books Maintenance Act (電子帳簿保存法) and qualified invoice system (インボイス制度), article 286-I-3° bis of the French Code général des impôts, Belgian Royal Decree no. 1 on VAT, EU VAT rules, or US GAAP.

The accounting profiles the Service ships with — a jurisdiction's chart of accounts, its consumption tax and rates, its fiscal year, the legal forms a dojo may run under and the bookkeeping regimes open to them, and every note about what a jurisdiction requires — are general information collected for convenience. They may be incomplete, out of date, or simply wrong for your dojo. They are not legal, tax or accounting advice, and no professional relationship arises from your using them.

Every figure the Service produces — profit and loss, balance sheet, cash position, VAT return, trial balance, entry numbering, closed periods — is computed from what you enter and from nothing else. We do not check, audit, validate or reconcile it. An entry that is missing, duplicated, mis-dated or booked to the wrong account produces a wrong report, and the Service has no way of knowing.

You therefore remain solely responsible for:

• keeping the books, records and invoices that the law applicable to you actually requires, in the form and for the period it requires;
• the accuracy, completeness and retention of those records;
• every declaration, return, payment, registration and deadline owed to a tax authority or any other authority;
• having a qualified professional — 税理士, expert-comptable, chartered or certified accountant, auditor — review anything from the Service before you rely on it.

Do not present anything produced by the Service to a tax authority, court, auditor, bank, insurer, funder or other third party as a certified, complete or authoritative record. If you choose to, you do so at your own risk and on your own responsibility.

We may correct, change or improve how the Service computes, numbers or presents figures, including in ways that change what a past period reports. Export and keep your own copies of anything that matters. We do not undertake to hold your data for any statutory retention period — see sections 8 and 11.

Use the Service to run a dojo. Do not:

• break the law with it, or use it for anything unlawful, fraudulent or harmful;
• record data about a person without a lawful basis for doing so;
• try to access another dojo's or another user's data, or probe, scan or test the security of the Service without our written permission;
• copy, scrape, resell, sublicense or redistribute the Service or the reference syllabus, or use either to build a competing product;
• reverse-engineer, decompile or work around a technical limit, a role restriction or a plan limit;
• upload malware, or content that infringes someone's rights, or use the Service to send unsolicited messages;
• put the Service under a load it is not meant to carry, or use it through automated means beyond ordinary use.

We may suspend an account or a dojo that does any of this, and will tell you why unless the law prevents us.

Security is the one exception to the line above about probing the Service. If you think you have found a vulnerability, we welcome a good-faith report: write to security@smartdojo.net with enough detail for us to reproduce it, give us a reasonable time to fix it before telling anyone else, and while you look, do not access, change or delete data that is not yours, and do not degrade the Service. A report made and handled this way is not a breach of these terms.

Reporting a vulnerability gives you no licence or right of any kind to use, reproduce, retain, distribute or otherwise benefit from SmartDojo or any part of it. The reference syllabus, the software and all other intellectual property remain ours (section 12): you may report an issue, but you gain no rights in the work by doing so.

Dojo Data stays yours. You grant us only the licence we need to run the Service: to host, store, process, transmit, back up and display that data in order to operate, secure and support it, and to comply with the law. We do not sell it, and we do not use it to train models.

For the personal data a dojo records about its members, the dojo is the controller and we act as its processor. Our Privacy Policy sets out the processing terms required by article 28 GDPR — the subject matter and duration, our instructions, confidentiality, security, sub-processors, assistance with data-subject requests, deletion, and audit — and it applies as a data processing agreement between us.

You must not record special-category data — health conditions, injuries, medical certificates, and anything else listed in article 9 GDPR — unless you have a lawful basis under both article 6 and article 9 and it is necessary for running the dojo. Free-text notes are not exempt from this.

We may compile aggregated statistics that identify no person and no dojo, and use them to understand and improve the Service.

While SmartDojo is invite-only it is free. Paid plans, their prices and what they include are shown on our site; we will tell you before a plan you are on starts costing money, and you will be free to stop.

• Prices are stated per dojo and per period, and it is stated whether they include tax. Japanese consumption tax, EU VAT or any other applicable tax is added or accounted for as the law requires.
• A subscription renews for the same period until it is cancelled. Cancelling stops the next renewal; the period already started runs to its end.
• We refund a period already started only where mandatory law requires it, or where we have failed to provide the Service.
• If payment fails, we may suspend the dojo's access after telling you and giving you a reasonable chance to fix it. Data is not deleted for non-payment before the period in section 11.
• We may change prices with at least 30 days' notice before the change applies to you; you may cancel before it takes effect.

Payments are processed by Stripe Payments Europe, Ltd. and its affiliates (“Stripe”). You pay on Stripe's own hosted pages, and card details are collected and held by Stripe, not by us: no card number, expiry date or security code ever reaches our servers. Paying through the Service means accepting Stripe's own terms, and Stripe also processes your payment data as its own controller for fraud prevention and legal compliance. From Stripe we receive only what running a subscription needs — its status and plan, the amount and currency, the dates of the current period, and the reason a payment failed.

If you are a consumer in the EU, the EEA or the UK, you have 14 days to withdraw from a distance contract without giving a reason. If you ask for the Service to start immediately, you agree that performance begins during that period; you may still withdraw, but you will owe the part already supplied, and the right ends once the Service has been fully performed with your prior express consent. Write to contact@smartdojo.net to withdraw.

For paid plans sold from Japan, the disclosures required by the Act on Specified Commercial Transactions (特定商取引法) are published separately on our site.

SmartDojo is young and, for now, invite-only. Features may change, move or be withdrawn, and we may impose reasonable limits. We give notice of a change that materially reduces what a paid plan provides, and you may cancel if you do not accept it.

We do not promise uninterrupted service. We may take the Service down for maintenance, and we aim to do it outside the hours a dojo teaches. We give no service-level commitment unless one is written into a plan you have subscribed to.

SmartDojo is run by a single owner. If the Service has to be shut down for a personal reason of the owner, we will give you at least 30 days' notice before it closes so you can export your data — except in the event of the owner's death, where such notice may not be possible.

• You may stop at any time: close your account from your account page, or ask us at contact@smartdojo.net.
• We may suspend or terminate an account or a dojo for a serious or repeated breach of these terms, for non-payment, or where continuing would expose us or others to legal risk. Except where the law or an urgent risk prevents it, we tell you first and give you a chance to put it right.
• For 30 days after termination you may ask us to export the dojo's data. After that we delete or anonymise it as described in our Privacy Policy, and backups age out on their own cycle.
• Because the books may be subject to a retention period that outlives your subscription, export them before you leave. Deleting a dojo deletes its ledger with it, and we cannot restore what has aged out of backup.
• Sections 6, 8, 12, 14, 15, 16, 18 and 19 survive termination.

The Service — its software, design, text, database structure, the SmartDojo name and logo, and the reference syllabus — belongs to SmartDojo or to those who licensed it to us. You get a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable right to use it while these terms are in force, and nothing more.

A dojo's own syllabus, once built or edited in the Service, is that dojo's Dojo Data — including where it started as a copy of our reference content. Our reference content itself stays ours: use it to run your dojo, not to republish it.

We publish a page for some federations at /federations, describing the body and transcribing the grading syllabus it publishes. That page is ours: we write it, we host it, and we may change or withdraw it at any time. A federation having a page on SmartDojo acquires no right of any kind in the Service — not in the reference syllabus, its text, illustrations, animations or images, not in the software or database structure, and not in the SmartDojo name or logo. Nothing on such a page transfers, licenses or shares ownership of any of it, and no partnership, affiliation, agency or endorsement between us and that federation is created or implied. What remains the federation's is its own name, marks and published syllabus, which we describe factually and which stay theirs.

If you send us feedback, an idea or a bug report, we may use it without owing you anything for it. You keep any rights you already had in it.

The Service runs on infrastructure we do not own and uses providers we do not control: hosting and database providers, an email delivery provider, Stripe for payments, and Google Analytics for audience measurement where you have consented to it. They are listed, with their role and location, in our Privacy Policy and Cookie Policy. We choose them with care and bind them contractually, but we are not responsible for their own acts or omissions beyond what the law imposes on us.

To the fullest extent the law allows, the Service is provided “as is” and “as available”. We do not warrant that it will be uninterrupted, error-free or secure against every attack, that it fits a particular purpose of yours, or that the reference syllabus, the accounting profiles or any figure derived from them is accurate, complete or current.

If you are a consumer, this section does not affect the statutory rights you have where you live, including your right to a service that conforms to what was described.

To the fullest extent the law allows, and subject to the exceptions below:

• we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, loss of profit, revenue, business, goodwill or anticipated savings, or for the loss or corruption of data beyond restoring it from our routine backups;
• we are not liable for any tax, accounting, regulatory or legal consequence of relying on the books or on any figure, profile or note in the Service — including tax reassessments, fines, penalties, interest, rejected filings, audit costs or professional fees. Section 6 is the reason: those outputs are information, and they are yours to verify;
• we are not liable for what a dojo, an owner, an instructor or a member does with the Service, or for the relationship between a dojo and its members;
• our total liability arising out of or in connection with these terms, over any twelve-month period, is limited to the greater of the fees you paid us for the Service in that period and JPY 10,000.

None of this limits or excludes liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, for our wilful misconduct or gross negligence, or for anything that cannot lawfully be limited or excluded. Where you are a consumer, the mandatory protections of the law of your country of residence apply in your favour whatever this section says — including, in Japan, articles 8 and 8-2 of the Consumer Contract Act (消費者契約法), and in the EU, the EEA and the UK, the consumer protections of your own law.

If you use the Service other than as a consumer, you will hold us harmless against claims, losses and reasonable costs arising from your use of it in breach of these terms, from Dojo Data you had no right to record, or from your failure to meet an accounting, tax or data-protection obligation of your own. We will tell you promptly of any such claim and will not settle it without asking you.

We may change these terms — to follow a change in the law, to cover a new feature, or to make something clearer. We publish the new text here with the date it takes effect. For a change that materially affects your rights or obligations we give at least 30 days' notice by email or in the app, and you may close your account before it applies. Continuing to use the Service after that date means you accept the new text.

These terms and any dispute arising from them are governed by the law of Japan, and the Tokyo District Court has exclusive jurisdiction as the court of first instance.

If you are a consumer resident outside Japan, that choice does not deprive you of the protection of the mandatory rules of your own country's law, and you may bring proceedings in the courts of the country where you live. Nothing here prevents either of us from seeking urgent relief wherever it is needed.

Before going to court, please write to us at contact@smartdojo.net. Most things are quicker to fix that way.

These terms are published in English and in Japanese. If the two differ, the Japanese text prevails for users resident in Japan, and the English text prevails for everyone else. A translation into any other language is provided for convenience only.

• If a clause is held invalid, the rest stays in force and the invalid clause is read down to what the law allows.
• Not enforcing a right straight away is not giving it up.
• You may not transfer your rights under these terms without our consent. We may transfer ours to a successor of the business, on notice to you, provided your rights are not reduced.
• Neither of us is liable for a failure caused by something genuinely outside our control.
• We give notice by email to the address on your account, or in the app. You give notice to contact@smartdojo.net.
• These terms, with the Privacy Policy and the Cookie Policy, are the whole agreement between us about the Service.

SmartDojo, based in Japan. Email: contact@smartdojo.net. Web: https://smartdojo.net.