The rules every page is held to

What Tallyroo publishes

Tallyroo publishes arithmetic, not advice. Each calculator runs a schedule the law sets — stamp duty, land tax, registry fees, grants, tax — on the numbers you give it, and shows the working behind the result. Whether those numbers suit your circumstances is a question for a conveyancer or a licensed adviser.

Where a result depends on a condition the calculator does not ask about, such as a first-home test or a residence requirement, the page states the condition rather than assuming it. Where we know a calculator does not model something, its own page says so.

Sources

Every rate, threshold and concession the law sets comes from a primary source: the legislation, the revenue office, the ATO, the land registry or the agency that sets it. A summary is not a source, whether it is a news story, a law firm’s briefing or a commercial calculator: reading the instrument itself has more than once overturned a figure that summaries repeat.

The schedules the calculators run on — stamp duty, land tax, registry fees, grants, car duty, registration and tax rates — sit in data files that record each source, the year it applies to and the date it was last checked. A calculator that runs on an official schedule carries a stamp with that year and date, and lists its sources.

If a figure or rule cannot be confirmed from its source, the page says it is not confirmed instead of guessing. Where an agency’s published figure and the law read literally disagree, the page says which one it shows. One figure has no official schedule at all, lenders mortgage insurance: the LMI page names the published premium table its bands come from and labels every premium an estimate.

Anything a page says about another website comes from opening that website, and says only what was seen: “two of the calculators we opened”, never “most calculators”.

Prices nobody publishes

Agent commission, a conveyancer’s professional fee, building inspections and builders’ quotes have no official schedule; the market sets them. Tallyroo never states an average or a “typical” figure for them. The calculator works on the quote you have.

Where such a field is filled in so the calculator has something to show, its label says “(example)” or its hint starts “Example figure”. Where you need a price we do not have, the page links to the official tool that gives one instead of estimating it — Service NSW’s Green Slip Price Check on the rego calculator, for instance. Figures taken from official data, such as duty, registry fees and the Reserve Bank’s average rate for new owner-occupier variable loans, are not examples.

How figures are checked

The calculation engines carry automated tests, and the tests run on every build. The stamp duty engines must reproduce the revenue office’s own worked examples in NSW, Victoria and Queensland, and the figures in the published schedules elsewhere; the tax engines must reproduce the ATO’s worked examples where it publishes them. If a change would break one of those figures, the build fails and the site cannot deploy.

The rate files are checked as well. The build fails if a file still names last year’s rates 60 days after its year turns over (1 July for financial-year rates, 1 January for a tax assessed on the calendar year, as NSW and Victorian land tax are), or if its verification date is missing or in the future.

Some figures rest on a legal basis with an end date of its own: a temporary concession, thresholds set by a notice that lapses unless a Bill passes, a rate the Reserve Bank republishes every month. Those carry a re-check date, and the build warns 30 days ahead and fails once the date has passed. A figure carried forward from an earlier year, because the new one is not out yet, is marked provisional and listed on every build so it cannot be forgotten.

Pages are reviewed again, claim by claim against their sources, in a separate pass after they are built. The methodology page has the detail, with examples of what the checks have found.

Corrections

When a published figure or claim turns out to be wrong, it is fixed and written up in the public corrections log: the date, the page, what it said, what it says now and how the error was caught. A wrong figure is never quietly edited. Smaller wording fixes that change no figure or claim are mentioned in a line rather than listed one by one.

The wording each correction retired is kept in a register, and the build fails if it appears on the site again. A correction that retired no wording, such as a computed figure, names the test that guards it instead.

Found something wrong? Email [email protected], the address on the contact page. Name the page and the figure: every calculator built on an official schedule shows its source and the date it was checked, so an error is easy to point at.

Independence and advertising

No lender, broker, insurer or agent pays Tallyroo to appear on the site. Tallyroo is not owned by a bank, a broker or a real-estate portal, it does not sell leads, and no result is shaped by a commercial relationship.

The site will be supported by advertising, but ads are not running yet. When they are, these rules apply:

• Every ad is labelled “Advertisement”.
• No ad sits between a calculator’s inputs and its result, or above a page’s opening content.
• No more than three ads on a long calculator page, and two on a stamp duty page for a single price.
• No full-screen ads between pages, and no pop-up video.
• On a phone, the result bar that follows you down the page hides whenever an ad is on screen, so a tap meant for the bar cannot land on an ad.

Advertising never changes a number, and no advertiser is told what you type into a calculator. The privacy policy covers the ad network and its cookies.

Keeping pages current

Most Australian rates change on 1 July, so every schedule is re-checked against its source each July. A change that does not wait for July, such as a rate that starts on a set date or a concession that ends, is written into the page with its date and goes in a diary of mid-year checks.

Who is responsible

Tallyroo is run by Rakesh Choudhary; the About page says who he is and where to check his profile. The site is operated in Australia by Deepanshu Chaudhary, who holds the domain licence. He has no editorial role: he does not set, check or approve any figure, page or calculator.