Editorial policy
This page explains how we make our guides and templates.
How we choose topics
We look for questions that people who run a small trade business search for: what to put on an invoice, how to price a job, how to get paid. We pick the ones we can answer well from public sources. We do not give legal, tax or accounting advice.
Our sources
For wages and costs we prefer U.S. government sources, such as the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the IRS, the Small Business Administration and state agencies. For prices, we use published surveys and cost guides, and say who published them and when. Sentences that draw on a source carry a numbered link to it.
How a guide is made
- Research. We collect facts from our sources. For each one we record the source and a short quote. We load every source page and confirm the quote is really there.
- Draft. We write the guide, mainly from those facts.
- Automatic checks. Software checks the guide’s structure and reading level, and rejects banned phrases. It checks every price, rate and figure against its source, and redoes the arithmetic in worked examples.
- Approve. Our editor, George McTaggart, reads the guide and decides whether to publish it.
We use AI tools in steps 1 and 2. Read how we use AI.
We do not fact-check every sentence by hand, and no accountant or lawyer reviews our guides. Read our disclaimer.
Our templates
We build the templates and the builder by hand, and test the arithmetic in code. Templates carry no prices: you enter your own.
What we never do
- We never invent quotes, people, experiences or studies.
- We never give a price or a rate without its source and year.
- We never make templates for documents that pretend to come from someone else, such as receipts from a store you did not buy from.
Corrections
If you find an error, tell us. We fix confirmed errors quickly.
Advertising
Advertising may help pay for this site. Advertisers have no say in what we write. We never place ads inside the builder.
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