How Guidepost checks its facts

A number appears only when we can name where it came from

Research and building are separate steps here, and they are done by separate sessions. Research produces a working document in which every fact carries one of three marks: verified against a named official source on a named date, taken from something already audited in our own repository, or unverified.

The third mark is the one that matters. An unverified figure may not be rendered. It does not appear in small print, it does not appear with a hedge, and it does not appear rounded. The page shows an honest fallback instead, which usually means telling you plainly to check with your own registry, and linking you there.

That is why some pages tell you a fee and others tell you where to look it up. The difference is not effort. It is whether we could find a published source we were willing to name.

The figures get re-checked on a schedule

Fees change, forms get renumbered, and programs close. So the figures already on the site are re-checked against their sources on a monthly sweep, and the result of each sweep is written down before anything is edited.

A sweep can end in three ways: a figure is confirmed and its checked date moves forward, a figure has changed and the page changes with it, or a source can no longer be reached and the figure comes off the page until it can be. The third outcome is the reason a number sometimes disappears from a guide.

When something is wrong, we fix it and we say so

Corrections are not quiet here. When a fact changes, the change is recorded with the date and the guide it affected, and that record is a page on this site you can read without asking us.

Every guide also carries the month its facts were last checked, near the top, beside a link to that record. If the date looks old to you, that is information you are entitled to have rather than something to be hidden by a rolling "updated today" stamp.

See what has changed

What we keep, and what we never keep

When you fill in a questionnaire and download a free document, your answers are used to build the file and then discarded. Nothing is saved to a database.

When you buy a document package, your answers are kept for 30 days so you can download it again or correct a detail without paying twice, and then they are deleted automatically. You can delete them yourself sooner from the link in your receipt. We never store your card number: payment is handled by Stripe, and all we keep from it is Stripe's own reference for the transaction.

There is no account to create, and we do not ask for a Social Insurance Number anywhere. The full detail, including the one other place information is held, is on the privacy page.

Checks run before anything ships

Some of this is enforced by hand and some of it by machine. Before any change to this site goes live, a series of automated checks runs against it, and a failure stops the release. They check things a person forgets: that a figure on a page still matches the file it came from, that a link still resolves, that a new page is reachable from somewhere, that a document still carries the right branding.

It would be easy to overstate what that means, so plainly: these checks catch drift and broken wiring. They cannot tell us that a registry changed its fee this morning. That is what the monthly sweep and your own eyes are for, which is why every page still tells you to confirm anything that matters with the office that will receive your paperwork.

If a document is not what you needed