Our methodology — the promise behind every number

How we verify our numbers

DollarRoots publishes financial numbers people make real decisions with — tax owed, salary in hand, IPO premiums, money sent across borders. A wrong number here costs someone real money. So every figure on this site follows the same written rules, and this page is those rules.

The five rules

Official source first, always

Tax slabs, rates, limits, deposit rules and deadlines come from the primary official source — incometax.gov.in and the Finance Act, the IRS, RBI, SEBI, EPFO, or the relevant country's regulator. A blog, news site or aggregator is never the source of truth for a rule.

Two sources must agree

Before any figure ships, it is cross-checked against a second, independent source. If the two disagree, we investigate — we never silently pick one. A number that cannot be confirmed does not go live; we'd rather show a gap than a guess.

Market data is attributed, never invented

Some numbers have no official source — IPO grey market premium (GMP) is dealer indication, not a quoted price, and trackers routinely disagree. So we do what nobody else in that market does: we name every tracker we quote, show the full rangeacross them instead of printing one number as fact, flag wide disagreement openly, and grade GMP's predictions against real listing results in a public accuracy scorecard. If our data ever goes stale past its refresh promise, the page says so itself rather than pretending to be current.

Rules live in dated, versioned data files

Every rate and slab is stored once, in a data file labelled with its financial year and its source — not hard-coded into pages. When a rule changes (a Budget, a Finance Act, an IRS revenue procedure), the file is updated once and every tool that uses it updates together. Each tool states its assumptions and financial year in plain language on the page.

Corrections ship fast and openly

If you spot a number that looks wrong, tell us. Confirmed errors are fixed in hours, not weeks, and material corrections are noted on the affected page. We treat a reader catching an error as a gift, not an embarrassment.

How often data is refreshed

  • Live market data (IPO GMP, subscription figures) — refreshed twice every market day, morning and evening IST, with the exact timestamp shown on the page.
  • Exchange rates in remittance tools — fetched live at page load from public rate APIs, labelled as indicative.
  • Tax and regulatory rules — updated on the official cycle (Union Budget, Finance Act, IRS annual inflation adjustments) and re-verified when we build or revisit a tool.

What we deliberately don't do

  • We don't give personalized financial advice, and we're not SEBI-registered advisors — our tools model the common case and our analysis pieces are opinion argued from on-page math.
  • We don't sell financial products, and advertising never influences a formula, a verdict or a comparison. Where a link may become a partner link, the page says so.
  • We don't publish a number to fill space. If a figure can't be verified, the page shows an honest blank instead.

Who does the checking

Every page is verified by Shubham Yadav, the engineer who founded and builds DollarRoots — someone who works professionally inside fintech and trading systems where a wrong number is not an option. More about him and this site →

Even with all of this, results are estimates built on the common case — your employer's structure or your tax situation may differ, and for decisions that matter you should confirm against the official source or a qualified professional. See our disclaimer for the full picture.