Editorial policy

Assaylist exists to help UK businesses choose business software without having to take a vendor's word for anything. Everything we publish is written for someone who has to make a real decision with real money — an owner, a finance manager, an operations lead — not for a search engine.

That means concrete facts over adjectives: what it costs in pounds, whether it is HMRC-recognised, whether support answers the phone, and what breaks at the next tier.

Before a product appears on this site, we:

• Set it up and use it for the job it claims to do, on the plan a small business would realistically buy.
• Record the vendor's published UK list price in pounds, note whether it is quoted including or excluding VAT, and stamp the row with the date a human last checked it.
• Verify UK compliance claims — Making Tax Digital recognition, RTI payroll, auto-enrolment, CIS — against the vendor's own documentation and HMRC's published list of recognised software, and record the source.
• Write the description ourselves. We never paste vendor marketing copy: it is copyrighted, and it is the opposite of what this site is for.

Where we have not verified something, the page says “not listed yet” rather than filling the gap with a guess.

Every rating on this site is calculated from verified user reviews. Nobody types a score in by hand, and no score is ever adjusted after the fact.

Reviewers rate four dimensions plus an overall score, all out of five:

• Ease of use — how quickly a normal person gets productive.
• Value for money — what you get for the price actually paid.
• Customer service — whether support helps when it matters.
• Functionality — whether it does the job properly.

A product's displayed rating is the mean of published reviews, recalculated automatically whenever a review is published, edited or removed. Aggregate rating markup is emitted to search engines only where genuine reviews exist.

We do not publish invented reviews. Development fixtures used while building the site are flagged in the database and excluded from every public aggregate. We do not buy reviews, and we do not scrape them from other platforms — that would breach their terms, misuse someone else's copyrighted content, and fall foul of the fake-review provisions of the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024.

Assaylist is funded by affiliate commissions. The editorial rule is simple: a commission pays for the site, not for the verdict.

Nobody can pay to be listed, to be rated higher, or to appear in a comparison. Products with no affiliate programme are covered on identical terms. Where we earn a commission we disclose it above the link, on the page, every time. The detail is in our affiliate disclosure.

Software pricing and compliance status move. Our maintenance commitments are:

• Pricing re-checked at least quarterly against the vendor's published UK price, with the check date shown on the product page.
• HMRC recognition re-checked quarterly against HMRC's published software lists. A stale “HMRC-recognised” badge is the single most damaging error this site could publish, and we treat it that way.
• Reviews moderated before publication, normally within two working days.

We will get things wrong occasionally. When we do, we want to know quickly and fix it in public.

Email editorial@assaylist.uk with the page and what is wrong. We aim to acknowledge within two working days. If a correction materially changes what a page said — a price, a compliance claim, a verdict — we update the page and note the change and its date rather than editing silently.

Vendors are welcome to point out inaccuracies about their own product. Being corrected by a vendor does not entitle them to a more favourable review.