Ground rules
How Seat Count researches and writes
The standards behind Seat Count: where the information comes from, how pages are dated and corrected, and what the site will not do.
filed · The Seat Count editors
Parts of this guide
Seat Count is written for people who buy, administer and renew business software. A page like that is worth reading only if you can see where it came from and how fresh it is. Here is how we work.
Working from the paper
Most pages start from documents: order form structures, contract clauses, vendors’ published terms and help pages, and the vocabulary buyers meet in procurement and licensing. When a page describes how a clause usually reads, it says it is describing common practice and does not pretend to quote your contract.
A claim about a vendor’s product has to match something the vendor or an independent party has published. If we cannot find that match, the claim stays out or is marked unconfirmed.
Why there are no vendor prices
Software prices shift often and depend on region, plan and negotiation. Seat Count explains how a pricing model works and never quotes a vendor’s price as though it were fixed. A figure on a page is either an example or something you typed into a tool, and the page says which.
Telling when a page has gone stale
Every page carries the date it was published. A meaningful revision adds an updated date beside it, while a typo fix leaves the date alone. If a clause or price has moved since we wrote about it, send the page name and the line to us through the contact page. We compare the report with the source, and a confirmed one changes the page and the date.
A byline you can check
Pages go out under the name of the editorial team, The Seat Count editors. Nobody is presented as an expert and no page claims credentials for its writers. What you can check is the method and the sources.
Independence and limits
Explaining terms and trade-offs is the job. A page is no advice to buy or avoid a vendor, and a comparison says how it was made. Nothing here replaces reading your own contract, because the document you sign governs. Where real money or risk is involved, have counsel review it.
The kit
The checklists, the glossary and the reference pages in the buyer’s kit follow the same rules. Each is built to sit beside an open document and is revised when the practice it describes changes.