Editorial policy

1. Our Core Purpose

The Small Team Builder exists to provide practical, legally grounded guidance for UK founders taking on their first employees. Kayley Hart writes every guide, tool and template on this site. She has spent her whole working life around small teams — hiring them, running them and rebuilding them — and she is not a lawyer, accountant or regulated financial adviser, so nothing here replaces advice about your own business.

We write for the reality of small teams. Content starts from a real problem a founder can describe — such as 'I do not know what to delegate' or 'My team still depends on me' — and ends with an actionable outcome, whether that is a template, a calculation, or a clear explanation of a regulatory rule.

We refuse to publish generic 'best of' listicles built solely for search engine ranking. Every guide is written to answer one specific, pressing question a first-time employer is likely to ask, and is actively maintained when the answer changes.

2. Content Structure and Delivery

Most guides follow a consistent architecture: the problem statement, the underlying rule or decision, the financial or operational numbers involved, immediate next steps, and — where strictly relevant — the tools or products that can facilitate the solution once the policy is settled.

Our calculators and interactive checklists execute entirely within your browser environment. No email address is required to generate a result, and no input data is transmitted to our servers. Your answers are stored locally on your device, ensuring complete privacy and allowing you to return to a draft at your convenience.

Where a page relies on a tax, payroll, or pension figure, that data is drawn from the site's central, versioned tax-variable record. This ensures that every calculation across the site uses the exact same verified number, eliminating discrepancies between pages.

3. Rigorous Sourcing Standards

Employment, payroll, tax, and pension figures are strictly attributed to official primary sources: GOV.UK, HMRC, Acas, or The Pensions Regulator, accompanied by the date of last verification. We link directly to the underlying official page wherever practical rather than paraphrasing complex rules from memory.

We operate a zero-tolerance policy for invented statistics, fabricated case studies, or unverified testimonials. Where no reliable public figure exists, we explicitly state the absence of data rather than providing an unfounded estimate. We do not present rounded or illustrative numbers as if they were official statutory rates.

Content requiring a qualified professional reviewer is prominently labelled 'Awaiting expert review' until a named reviewer with verifiable credentials has formally checked it. Please refer to our Expert Review Policy for a detailed explanation of this process.

4. Commercial Independence

Affiliate and partner disclosure: this site earns money from a small number of authorised partner campaigns, currently Tide and Capital on Tap. Partner links are tracked. We do not accept payment for a positive verdict, and we publish who should not use a product as prominently as who should.

Our commercial partners exercise absolutely no influence over our editorial verdicts. No partner is permitted to review, approve, or veto a page prior to publication. Our internal mandate is unequivocal: policy precedes product. We thoroughly explain the underlying rule, obligation, or control before mentioning any product that might assist with it.

If a product is unsuitable for a specific segment of our readership — for example, a sole trader considering a credit facility restricted to limited companies — we state this exclusion as clearly and prominently as we describe the product's benefits.

5. Maintenance and Revisions

Pages are systematically reviewed and updated when a primary source changes, at the commencement of each UK tax year, or when a reader identifies a discrepancy. For a comprehensive understanding of how factual errors are addressed post-publication, please consult our Corrections Policy.