Trust

Trust is checkable.

No borrowed logos. No invented assurance. Coverage, derivations, security limits and mistakes remain open for inspection before you talk to anyone.

No customer claimsNo borrowed certificationsCorrections dated

Four things you can check right now.

Each of these existed before we asked anyone for a meeting. None of them requires talking to us, and each is written to be falsifiable rather than flattering.

Methodology

How a filing becomes a fact: which fields are read, which conclusions are derived, and where a derivation is a judgment call rather than a lookup. If you disagree with a derivation, this is the page that lets you say so precisely.

Check: does the 80–120 election get stated correctly?

Coverage

What is in the indexed universe, what is deliberately excluded and why, how fresh it is, and the four categories of thing it cannot tell you. A coverage page that only lists strengths is a marketing page.

Check: is the excluded population named, or hand-waved?

Security & data handling

Where the service runs, how firms are separated, what we collect from an access request, and an explicit list of the assurances we do not claim. Our cloud provider’s certifications are theirs, not ours.

Check: is a certification claimed that has not been earned?

Changelog

Dated entries for coverage, methodology and access changes — including corrections to things we published wrongly. A product that never records a correction is not one that never made one.

Check: are there corrections in here, or only launches?

What we will not claim.

Most of these are things a pre-launch product could get away with saying. The reason not to is narrow and practical: the buyer here is a professional whose job is testing assertions, and one unearned claim retroactively devalues every earned one on the site.

No certifications we do not hold: 5500RADAR does not claim SOC 1, SOC 2, ISO 27001 or equivalent. We run on Microsoft Azure; Azure’s certifications belong to Azure and are not presented as ours. If our own posture changes, the change gets a dated changelog entry.
No customer logos, counts or testimonials: We are pre-launch and there is no live customer data in the platform. There is therefore nothing honest to put in a logo strip, so there isn’t one.
No largest-universe claim: The indexed universe is deliberately scoped to plans plausibly relevant to audit and advisory work. A bigger number was available by including plans nobody in this market will ever act on. See Coverage for what is left out.
No verdicts dressed as advice: The audit screen reports what the filing-category and waiver rules produce from the facts you enter. It does not test every exemption, it does not know your plan, and it is not legal, accounting, tax or audit advice.
No participant data: The platform derives nothing about individuals from public filings, and the access form explicitly asks you not to send census, payroll, beneficiary or account information.

Where the data comes from.

There is one source of record, and it is public.

U.S. Department of Labor / EBSA: Public Form 5500 disclosure data and the attachments filed with those returns, released through EFAST2. 5500RADAR is an independent product and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the Department of Labor in any way.
Filed attachments: Independent auditor’s reports, plan financial statements, notes and required supplemental schedules, where publicly filed and available.
Public company filings: Where a plan connects to an SEC registrant — an 11-K filer, for instance — that relationship is identified from public sources.
Nothing else: No purchased contact lists as a data source for plan facts, no scraped private portals, no recordkeeper feeds, no participant-level anything.

Every displayed fact keeps its plan year and its source document attached, which is the only way a reader can check us rather than take our word for it. The sample plan shows what that looks like on a record.

Design partners.

We are inviting a small number of firms and plan professionals to review the product before launch. The program is product research—not an endorsement, client relationship, or promise of future attribution.

What a design partner gets

Early access on plans you already know, using public filing records only.
Direct input into product priorities, with transparent decisions about what changes and why.
Our derivations opened up — if you think a rule is applied wrongly, you get to argue with the person who wrote it.

What we ask in return

An hour a month, roughly, of honest reaction.
Real questions from real work — the ones your current data cannot answer.
No expectation that participation becomes a public endorsement.

The terms, plainly

Public filing records only. The program does not request or accept participant-level census, payroll, beneficiary, health, or account data. Do not submit confidential client lists.
No obligation to buy at the end of it.
No name, logo, quote, or case study used without separate written permission for that specific use. Permission may be withdrawn for future use.
A small number of firms, weighted toward practices that will use it hardest.

Review the full program

Who you are actually talking to.

Everything else on this page asks you to check a document. This part is different, because at some point you are deciding whether to trust the judgment behind the derivations — and judgment belongs to a person, not a company page.

So the commitment is narrow and testable. There is no support queue and no sales team between you and the person who wrote the rules this product applies. If you email about a derivation, the reply comes from whoever decided it, and it will either defend the reasoning or concede the point.

Ask why, not just what: Every derivation on this site has a reason behind it that we can state. If the reason does not survive contact with your experience, we would rather find that out now than after you have relied on it.
Disagreement is the useful signal: “This is wrong for a plan I know” is the most valuable message we receive. It is worth more than a demo request, and it gets answered first.
No anonymous authority: Nothing here hides behind “our proprietary methodology.” Where a rule involves a judgment call, the methodology says so and says which way we went.

Reach us directly. Questions about a derivation, a coverage limit or a security matter go to tkadura@5500radar.com and are answered by a person, not a queue.

When we get it wrong.

We will. The rules here are genuinely intricate, the source documents are inconsistent, and a derivation that looked obvious in April can turn out to be wrong in August. What we can commit to is the handling:

Corrections are dated, not silent: A wrong derivation or a wrong statement gets an entry in the changelog saying what it was and when it changed. Quietly editing a page and moving on is how a product loses the only thing it has.
Tell us and we will look: If a rule is applied wrongly against a plan you know, that is the most valuable message we can receive. It is worth more to us than a demo request.
Security issues have their own path: See Security & data handling for how to report one. Do not include credentials or participant data in a first email.

An example already in the record: the audit screen on this site returned the wrong answer for continuing plans between 80 and 99 participants with a prior large-plan filing — it treated the carry election as binding when it is permissive. That is corrected, written up in full, and logged.