How we research, write and correct
Our guides cover licences, taxes and money — content where being wrong costs the reader. This page is the standard we hold every guide to.
How our guides are researched
Every compliance or money claim in a CountStand guide traces to a primary source: the CBIC and the GST portal (gst.gov.in) for tax, FSSAI and FoSCoS (foscos.fssai.gov.in) for food licensing, the Gazette of India for regulatory change, and named industry bodies — the NRAI India Food Services Report chief among them — for market figures. Where a number is an operator benchmark rather than an audited statistic, we say so in the sentence itself.
We deliberately avoid the industry habit of repeating unsourced statistics. Where a widely-quoted figure has no traceable primary source, we either omit it or debunk it explicitly. A guide that is honest about uncertainty is worth more than one that is confidently wrong.
Who writes and who reviews
Guides are written by the CountStand team — operators and engineers who build the product the guides sit beside — and drafted with the assistance of AI tools, then researched, verified and edited by a human before anything publishes. The byline on every guide states the author and their role.
Tax and licensing guides carry a review path: guides marked "Reviewed by" have been checked by the named professional (for tax content, a practising Chartered Accountant). Guides still awaiting that review say so plainly — "Draft pending CA review" — and advise verifying specifics with your own advisor. We would rather show the state of review than imply one.
How guides stay current
Every guide shows its last-updated date, and that date changes only when the content substantively changes — never as a cosmetic bump. GST and FSSAI rules genuinely move; the compliance guides are on a review cadence, and material regulatory changes (a rate change, a licensing amendment) trigger an update outside the cadence.
Corrections
If we got something wrong, we want to know. Write to the support address below with the guide URL and the issue; verified corrections are fixed in the text, and material corrections are noted. The goal is simple: a restaurant owner should be able to act on a CountStand guide without cross-checking it somewhere else.