How we choose what to recommend

This page explains how we choose the products we feature on ExpenseBiz, why we feature them, and what stops a recommendation from getting written in the first place. It is the page we'd want to read before trusting any picks site with a real money decision.

The four things we score

Every candidate product is scored on four factors. They aren't equal — demand matters most because a product with no demand will eventually be killed by its own vendor, and we don't want to recommend a tool that disappears in six months.

Total weight is eight. A product needs to clear a minimum score on each factor individually before it's even considered — a strong demand score can't rescue a broken onboarding flow.

The "would we recommend this if we earned nothing" gate

Before any product makes it into a published pick, it passes a single hard gate: if ExpenseBiz earned zero from the recommendation, would we still recommend it? If the answer isn't a clean yes, the product doesn't ship.

This is not a rhetorical question. The check happens in writing, recorded against each pick, before any affiliate link is added. We've removed products from our shortlists after they failed this check despite being in our affiliate roster.

What "hands-on research" means

The homepage hero says we do hands-on research. Here's exactly what that means in practice:

• We sign up where we can. Self-serve products: we open accounts, run a real test transaction, and time the onboarding. Sales-gated products: we do the demo and the trial.
• We read the actual pricing page, not the marketing page. Marketing pages say "from £0" — pricing pages say what triggers the next tier. We work out the real annual cost for a representative SME (10 employees, 50 cards, mid-volume).
• We mine real SME reviews. Reddit threads (r/smallbusiness, r/Accounting, r/Payroll, country-specific subs), G2, Trustpilot, and product changelogs. We quote real customers verbatim and we cap quotes at 15 words to stay honest.
• We test customer support. We send a real question through each product's primary support channel and time the reply. If a product takes four days to answer a buyer-stage question, that's a finding we publish.

Editorial independence

The single rule that protects independence: affiliate revenue never determines ranking. A vendor with a higher commission rate does not move up our list. A vendor we like that has no affiliate program will be named in editorial even though we earn nothing.

Three smaller rules that come with it:

• No vendor sees our copy before publication.
• We never accept payment to add, remove, or reorder a pick. Every offer to do so is logged and declined in writing.
• When we make a mistake — a wrong price, a stale feature claim, an out-of-date integration — we fix it on the page and date the change. We don't quietly rewrite history.

How often we update

We re-validate every shortlist monthly. That means checking pricing pages, support-channel responsiveness, and any product changes since the last review. When a product materially changes — a price hike, a removed integration, a sales-only sign-up shift — we re-score and may demote, swap, or remove the pick.

The "Last updated" date on each shortlist page reflects the most recent re-validation, not the original publication date. If the date is more than 60 days old, treat the picks as provisional and check directly with the vendor before signing up.

How to flag a mistake

If you spot a stale price, a feature that no longer exists, a customer-experience claim that doesn't match your own, or anything else you think is wrong — email us at hello@expensebiz.io. We'd rather hear it from a reader who used the product than discover it from a complaint thread three weeks later.

Every mistake we fix gets dated on the affected page, so you can see when it was caught and what changed.