Editorial standards

Who publishes this

Everything on this site — the formation playbook, the calculators, and the reference pages — is published by the TagLot team at Ardeo Labs LLC. Authorship is organizational rather than personal: the pages carry no individual byline, and the same organization is named as author and publisher in the structured data on every page. We would rather tell you it is a company writing than attach a name that means nothing to you.

TagLot is a small independent software company. It is not a trade association, a law firm, an insurance broker, or an appraisal practice, and this page will never claim otherwise. The point of view here is an operator’s and a builder’s: we read the public sources, we build the tools estate-sale companies use to run a house, and we write down what a working liquidator needs to know. Where that is not enough — and on law, tax, and valuation it is not — the page says so and points you at someone who can actually rule on your situation.

Where the figures come from

Every hard number is attributed in the sentence that uses it, not in a bibliography at the foot of the page. When a chapter says startup budgets run from about $2,000 to $15,000 “per Step by Step Business and DIYAuctions”, that is the source of that specific claim and you can go check it. A reader should never have to hunt for where a figure came from.

Where sources disagree, we show the disagreement instead of averaging it away. Commission rates are the clearest case: the published figures genuinely differ, so the pages that discuss them name each source and where it lands, rather than quoting one national average that no source actually publishes. Anyone who gives you a single number for that is rounding off a real dispute.

Where no reliable published figure exists, we label the number a typical range and say what it rests on, rather than inventing precision. Calculator defaults are typical starting figures, never quotes: every one is meant to be replaced with a real number from your own state, your own insurer, and your own suppliers. A total built from our defaults is a placeholder; a total built from your quotes is a budget.

We do not publish a statistic we cannot attribute, and we do not collapse a range into a single number because it reads better. When we find that we have done it anyway, we correct the page and say so here.

What we will not publish

No customer reviews, ratings, testimonials, or case studies until we have real ones, from real customers, who agreed to be named. There are none on this site today, and there is no aggregate rating anywhere in our structured data, because we have nothing honest to put there. An invented five stars is the cheapest lie on the internet and we are not going to tell it.

No invented author personas, no fabricated review board, no credentials we do not hold, and no headcount we cannot stand behind.

No competitor price attacks. Our comparison pages report what other products publish about themselves, sourced; the claims we are accountable for are the ones we make about our own product.

Guidance, and the limits of it

Everything here is informational. It is not legal, tax, insurance, or appraisal advice, and reading it does not create a professional relationship with anyone.

The rules that govern estate liquidation (business licensing, sales tax registration and remittance, temporary signage, what may and may not be sold) vary by state, county, and city, and they change. Where a page touches one of those, it tells you to verify with your own state or county before you act, and that instruction is the actual advice. A local attorney, accountant, or insurance broker rules on your situation. A web page does not.

How the dates work

Every chapter, guide, and tool page carries a visible “Updated” line with a month and year. That date is content-stamped: an editor sets it when the content actually changes (the prose, a figure, or an answer), and not on every deploy.

That distinction matters. A date generated at build time would silently re-date the entire site every time we shipped an unrelated change, telling you a page was reviewed last week when nothing in it had moved since spring. The same stamped value feeds both the line you can see and the machine-readable dates a search engine reads, so the page and its markup always say the same thing.

How to report an error

If a figure here is wrong, out of date, or missing its source, write to [email protected] and name the page and the line. We would rather correct a number than defend it.

Corrections are made on the page itself, and the updated date moves when we make them. If a correction changes what the page told you to do, we say what changed rather than editing it away quietly.