How we check our figures

Every number on Deedsum is a record before it is a sentence. The page is built from those records, and the build refuses a number that is not one of them.

Where a figure is allowed to come from

A statutory figure is read from the body that sets it: the fee order, the revenue body, the Land Registry, or the council's own land-charges page. A firm's price is read from that firm's own published page and quoted word for word, with the day we read it. A comparison site is not a source. When one disagrees with the document, the document wins, and the page says where the other one went.

If a figure cannot be checked at that source, it does not go on the page. A gap is allowed. A guess is not. Deedsum does not do conveyancing and does not give legal or tax advice.

What the record holds

Each figure is one entry: the source address, who publishes it, the day we read it, and the day it is next due a read. The words under the figure are for the reader. The working notes stay in the repository, and the build stops if they appear on a page.

Where we have added or multiplied something ourselves, the page says so beside the number instead of presenting it as something the source published. The same records, without the private notes, are public at /api/metrics.json.

What the build refuses

The site is generated. Typing a number into a paragraph does not publish it. The build stops if a money figure is not one a record handed over, if a total we worked out is missing the sentence that says so, if the page contains a lead-gen phrase, if it contains a form or anything that would send what a reader types, if a link points at a page of ours that does not exist, or if the structured data does not parse. A page that fails does not replace the last good one.

The daily rebuild

Vercel builds the live site from the main branch of this site's repository on GitHub, and a rebuild runs every morning at 06:50 UTC. A change pushed to that branch is published by the same kind of build. A figure changes only when its record changes. The checked date beside a figure is the day we read its source, not the day the rebuild ran.

The morning watcher

A watcher runs every morning at 06:30 UTC. It never edits a page. It does four things:

• It opens every source link on every page, including every firm's and landlord's price page, and flags one that has gone dead. That is how a landlord's fee list that had been taken down was caught in October 2026.
• It notices when the text of a source page it watches has changed: today the Land Registry's fee page and the stamp duty rates page on gov.uk.
• It lists every figure whose recheck date has passed or falls within the next seven days.
• It confirms that the live site is the latest build of the repository, and that it rebuilt within the last two days.

On two other sites in the same family the watcher also reads a few figures off the source page by code and compares them with ours. No Deedsum figure is read that way yet. Here every figure is re-read by a person on its recheck date: someone opens the source and writes down what it says. When a recheck date passes, the build prints a warning as well. It does not invent a new number and it does not take the old one down.

Corrections

If a figure looks wrong, the contact page says what to send. A figure moves when we have read the source again and the source says it has moved, not because a message said so. The checked date moves to the day of that read.

Questions people ask

Where to go next

• About Deedsum: who publishes this, and why there is no form anywhere on it.
• Contact Deedsum: how to tell us a figure is wrong, and what we cannot help with.
• Conveyancing fees: the whole bill in one place, the legal fee, the disbursements and the tax.
• Every page Deedsum keeps: the hub, with the whole set on it.