How we decide

How a recommendation is made

What we weigh, in what order, and when we tell you we are not sure. The same answers always give the same result.

Four steps, in order

1
Can it serve you at all?
Products that cannot work for you — wrong country, wrong kind of worker, missing something you said you must have — are removed first.
2
What must it not break?
Limits you set, like a tight budget, count for more than preferences, so a product that breaks one cannot easily win.
3
How well does it fit?
Everything left is scored on the factors below.
4
What breaks a tie?
The product we know more about. Never the order our list happens to be in.

The starting weights. What you tell us moves them: say money is tight and price counts for much more.

What you said you needHow much of what you told us you need it actually does. The single heaviest factor.15%
Industry fitWhether the product genuinely serves businesses like yours, based on an explicit judgement we record per product.14%
What you are trying to doWhether this area addresses the priorities you named, rather than ones we assumed.10%
Works with what you haveWhether it connects to the products you already told us you use.10%
How you are staffedContractors or employees, mobile or fixed, one location or several.9%
Our assessment of the productOur own judgement of capability, track record and suitability for small businesses. Never influenced by money.9%
Your team sizeProducts strain at the edges of their range; we account for that rather than treating support as binary.8%
Your stageWhat a business needs in year one is not what it needs in year six.7%
Your budgetWeighted much more heavily when you tell us money is tight, because then it is close to a veto.7%
Simple or powerfulWeighted more heavily when you explicitly ask for the simplest thing available.5%
How long setup takesA product you never finish configuring has not helped you.4%
How sure we are of the recordOur confidence in the underlying data. Low confidence pulls a product down slightly.2%

You skipped too much for us to name a single pick, so we give you a shortlist instead.
The top two finished within 6 points of each other, so we say either would serve you.
Only one product qualified. We say it won unopposed rather than calling it the best.

Prices. We say how a product charges and whether it is budget or premium, not the figure, which changes too often to keep true.
Ratings or reviews. We have not collected any, and we do not borrow them from elsewhere.
First-hand testing. Our judgements come from providers’ own documentation and our research, and each product page says whether its record has been re-checked.
Advice. This is research and general information, not legal, tax, accounting or insurance advice.

Commission is not one of the things we weigh. Where a link could earn us money, it says so beside the link. How we get paid