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GDPR for Small Businesses

Plain-language guides to the obligations that actually affect EU SMBs: breach response, subject access requests, the records of processing, processor contracts, privacy policies, and retention schedules. Each guide pairs with a document template you can generate, redline with counsel, and ship in 10 minutes.

Generate the GDPR pack

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Built for the founder reading the law for the first time

The GDPR is a 99-article regulation written for harmonisation across 27 member states. Most of it does not bind a five-person SaaS the same way it binds a bank — but the obligations thatdo apply are unforgiving when ignored, and the case law lives in supervisory-authority decisions that nobody publishes in plain English.

These guides distil the operative parts: what to do, by when, with what evidence on file. Every guide cites the specific Articles, Recitals, and EDPB Guidelines we relied on, and every guide pairs with a CookieSentry document template that makes the obligation operational. The point is not to teach you GDPR; the point is to put the obligation in your hands in a form a regulator would accept.

The guides are written by an engineer, drafted against current EU and national law (DE / PL / LT for the document templates), and updated when EDPB or a national authority publishes operationally relevant guidance. They are not legal advice — they are a practical reference, and the templates they pair with are intended for review by qualified counsel before publication for high-risk processing.

What you'll find in each guide

  • 1The obligation in one sentence — the Article that creates it and what it actually requires you to do.
  • 2The decision rule— when it triggers, when it doesn't, and the carve-outs that matter.
  • 3The artefacts on file — what document or record demonstrates compliance to a supervisory authority during an audit.
  • 4Common scenarios — concrete fact patterns that map to the rule, with the reasoning shown.
  • 5An FAQ section — the questions our customers actually asked before they bought.

Practical guides

6 guides live · more shipping each sprint, mapped to the 6-document GDPR pack.

Live
Articles 33 & 34

Data breach response

The 72-hour DPA notification window, the 3-band decision rule for whether to notify, the breach register schema (Art. 33(5)), and five common scenarios walked through.

Pairs with Breach ProcedureRead guide
Live
Articles 12 & 15

DSAR response procedure

How to verify identity, the one-month response window, the two-month extension, when you can refuse a manifestly unfounded request, and the response-letter template.

Pairs with DSAR ProcedureRead guide
Live
Article 30

Records of processing (ROPA)

What every controller has to record per processing activity, when the small-business exemption (Art. 30(5)) actually applies, and how to keep the register current without rebuilding it every year.

Pairs with ROPARead guide
Live
Article 28

Processor contracts (DPA)

The eight mandatory clauses, sub-processor approval, international-transfer mechanics post-Schrems II, and the audit-rights wording that survives counsel review.

Pairs with DPARead guide
Live
Articles 13 & 14

Privacy policy essentials

What information you owe data subjects when you collect from them directly versus from third parties, how to surface lawful basis without legalese, and where the most-cited template gaps appear.

Pairs with Privacy PolicyRead guide
Live
Article 5(1)(e)

Data retention schedules

Storage limitation in practice: how to set retention triggers, when statutory periods (tax, HR, accounting) override your defaults, and the deletion-method choices that actually withstand audit.

Pairs with Data Retention PolicyRead guide

The whole pack — generated, redlinable, on file

Privacy Policy, Cookie Policy, Data Retention, Breach Procedure, DPA, and ROPA in one wizard. Bilingual EN with DE / PL / LT, with country-specific overlays for the supervisory authority, statutory retention periods, and national-law citations. Word + PDF export, ready for counsel redline.

Start the wizard

Related resources

GDPR readiness score

Free 32-question self-assessment across the 8 obligations a supervisory authority expects to see on file. Get a score, a category breakdown, and the documents that close your gaps.

Open

Breach response worksheet

Free interactive checklist for the first 72 hours of a personal data breach. Tick each step, record the facts, print or save as PDF for your incident records. No signup.

Open

DSAR response tracker

Free interactive tracker for handling a data subject access request inside the one-month window. Auto-computes the due date, walks the six-step process, prints a filled DSAR log entry.

Open

Cookie & ePrivacy guide

Searchable directory of common tracking cookies — what they do, who sets them, expiry, and whether they require consent. Pairs with the Cookie Policy template.

Open

Compliance FAQ

The questions SMB founders actually ask before paying for templates: validity, counsel review, audit posture, refunds, and how the wizard handles edge cases.

Open

GDPR document pack

Generate the full 6-document pack — Privacy Policy, Cookie Policy, Data Retention, Breach Procedure, DPA, ROPA — in 10 minutes. Bilingual EN + DE/PL/LT, counsel-redlinable Word + PDF.

Open

How the guides map to the document pack

Each guide explains the obligation in plain language and points to the document that operationalises it. Buy the pack and you ship the documents; read the guide and you understand what you're shipping. Either entry point gets you to the same audit-ready posture, which is the only posture that matters when a regulator or a procurement team asks for the documents on file.

  • Article 13 / 14 — Privacy Policy
  • ePrivacy + Article 6 — Cookie Policy
  • Article 5(1)(e) — Data Retention Policy
  • Article 33 / 34 — Breach Procedure
  • Article 28 — DPA (controller/processor)
  • Article 30 — ROPA

Stop bookmarking law-firm blog posts

Generate the document pack now and have the artefacts a supervisory authority asks to see on file before you need them. Read the guides at your own pace — they will be here when the next obligation is the one keeping you up.

Generate the GDPR pack

These guides summarise the GDPR and selected national-law overlays for orientation. They are a practical reference, not legal advice; the application of any provision to a specific fact pattern depends on circumstances only counsel familiar with your jurisdiction can assess. CookieSentry templates are drafted to current EU and national law and are intended for review by qualified counsel before publication for high-risk processing.

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