Straight talk

When you subscribe, we collect your email address so we can send the Monday email. When you answer a survey, we collect your first and last name, your role, and a practice profile in bands: ZIP code (your state comes from it), locations, dispensary, exam lanes, doctors, community type, years in ownership, annual collections band, weekly exam volume, how the practice started, ownership structure, clinic days, setting, specialty services, practice age, optical price tier, patient base, and non-OD staff. Bands only, never exact figures.

Each week you may enter that week's number, a guess at the national median, five quick pulse taps, two one-or-two answers, and an optional win to share. Entries are stamped with the week they belong to. That covers everything you actively give us. The next section covers what gets collected automatically.

Like most newsletters, our emails record opens and link clicks so we can tell what is useful and what gets skipped. Every email includes a one-click unsubscribe that works immediately.

The site uses the cookies it needs to keep you signed in and remember where you left off. We look at basic, aggregate site analytics, things like which pages get read and where readers drop off. We do not run advertising trackers and we do not build ad profiles.

Our emails sometimes link to other sites. Once you leave ours, their privacy practices apply, not this page.

Your entries are not tagged to your name in any published cut. Demographic details (state, org type, doctor count, years in practice) are used only to keep the data honest, for example filtering out obvious duplicates, separating owner entries from associate entries, and enabling apples-to-apples cuts like practices like yours.

No subscriber can ever read another practice's raw entry. This is enforced in the database, not just the interface.

Every reveal reports the group median and the middle 50% range (the 25th to 75th percentile), plus the number of practices behind the cut. We do not publish averages, and we do not publish targets.

No cut is ever displayed with fewer than 10 practices behind it. If a filter would leave a smaller sample, the cut is suppressed rather than shown with weak evidence. State cuts publish only when 10 or more practices land in them.

Nothing you submit is shown with your name. If you share a win, you choose how it is credited: anonymous, or first name and state. It may appear in a Monday email only with the choice you made. Nothing is posted publicly on your behalf.

To make percentile cuts useful on day one, the newsletter is seeded with anonymized aggregates drawn from bookkeeping and practice-management systems across the practices we serve. These aggregates are group medians and ranges, never a single practice's raw number.

We do not use tax-return-derived data of any kind in the baseline or the weekly reveals. Client tax data stays inside the engagement it belongs to.

Subscriber emails and names live with beehiiv, our newsletter platform. Weekly entries and practice profiles live in our application database, hosted on Supabase on servers in the United States. When you ask us to email you a reveal, that one email is sent through Resend, our transactional email provider; it touches no mailing list. We do not sell subscriber data and we do not share it with third parties for marketing.

Data travels encrypted between your device and our systems. Access is limited to the small team that runs The Weekly Refraction, and the anonymity rules are enforced with row-level security in the database, not just in the interface. No system is perfect, but we handle this data the way a CPA firm handles anything sensitive: carefully, and on a need-to-know basis.

We retain raw weekly entries for 36 months so year-over-year comparisons stay possible, then archive or delete them. Group aggregates, which contain no individual entries, are kept indefinitely.

You can ask us to remove your account, profile, and future entries at any time. Historical entries that have already been aggregated into group medians remain in the group cut in anonymized form, because there is no way to pull one anonymous number back out of a median.

You can unsubscribe from the Monday email with one click, any time. You can update your practice profile whenever it changes. You can ask for a copy of the data tied to your account, and you can ask us to delete it. If you live somewhere with specific privacy rights under state or national law, we honor those rights. You do not need to cite a statute to get a straight answer from us.

The Weekly Refraction is built for practice owners and their teams. It is not directed at children, and we do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 18.

We disclose data to authorities only when the law requires it, and only the minimum required.

If The Weekly Refraction or Refractional CFO ever changes hands through a sale or merger, your data travels under these same promises, and we will tell you before anything changes.

When our practices change, we update this page and change the date at the top. If a change is meaningful, we will say so in the Monday email rather than hoping you notice.

Reach the team at privacy@weeklyrefraction.com. For deletion or export requests, include the email address you subscribed with so we can verify the account.

Mailing address: Refractional CFO, 1070 W 1600 S, A-103, St. George, UT 84770.