Frequently Asked Questions

No. HPFAS Insights is a personal, informational platform conceptualised by a serving HPFAS officer, in an individual capacity. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or maintained on behalf of the Government of Himachal Pradesh or any of its departments. See our Disclaimer for the full position.

The platform was founded by a serving HPFAS officer with close to two and a half decades of on-the-ground experience in government finance, pay fixation, pensions and accounts. Read more on the About page.

You can read guides and articles, and try Free Tools, Smart Forms and comments without an account. An account is needed to track your token balance, save calculations, download PDFs, and use the referral programme.

No. Guides, articles and tool outputs reflect the founder's personal understanding and are for general informational purposes only. They are not a substitute for the applicable rules, notifications and government orders in force, which alone are authoritative.

Yes. The views expressed in any video, post or comment we publish on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook or our WhatsApp channel are personal to the founder and do not represent the official position of the Government of Himachal Pradesh or any of its departments, exactly as stated in our Disclaimer.

A limited number at a time — the current limit is shown on your Devices screen under Security & Settings, along with every device your account has been used from. You can sign one out there yourself, which frees a place straight away. Worth knowing what a “device” means here: it is a cookie this site sets in your browser, not anything about your machine — no website can read hardware. So Chrome and Safari on the same laptop count as two, and a private window or clearing your cookies starts another. If your list looks longer than the number of machines you own, that is usually why. A device you have not used for 60 days stops counting on its own.

Tokens are the unit that meters how many calculations you can run on premium tools. A basic calculation typically costs 100 tokens; an advanced one (like a full pay-revision run) costs about 500. Guides, comments, Smart Forms, Free Tools, and printing never cost a token.

Soft tokens come from your free monthly quota or an active subscription plan, and expire on a rollover schedule (typically 2–4 months, depending on your plan). Hard tokens come from one-time token packs or referral rewards and never expire. Soft tokens are always consumed first, so your hard tokens are preserved for later.

Yes. We keep a record of calculation activity — which tool was used, when, and how many tokens it consumed — so that token balances can be metered accurately and the referral and fair-use systems can be administered honestly. This activity log is necessary to run the token system and isn't optional. This is separate from the actual figures you enter into a calculator and the result it produces. Storing that underlying input/output data to your account is optional and entirely up to you — see the next question, and our Privacy Policy, for details.

Yes. Unless you actively choose to save a calculation (for example, to revisit or download it later), we do not retain the specific figures you entered or the detailed result beyond what's needed to show it to you in that session. Where you do save a calculation, you can view, export or delete it from your account at any time. How many saved calculations you can keep per tool depends on your plan — Lite allows 5, Standard 15, Pro 50, and Ultimate has no limit.

Once both your soft and hard token balances are exhausted, premium calculators pause until you either wait for your next monthly refill, upgrade your plan, or buy a one-time token pack. Guides, Free Tools, Smart Forms, comments and printing remain available regardless of your balance.

Hard tokens never expire, whether or not you have an active plan. Soft tokens get a 7-day grace period after a paid plan ends, so a short lapse while you renew doesn't cost you anything — after that window, unused soft tokens from that plan are gone.

Yes. Completing a Personal Details field on your dashboard earns 50 hard tokens per field, one time each. You can also earn 500 hard tokens per platform through the Referrals tab's "Follow & earn" panel by subscribing to our YouTube channel (live now — Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp channel verification are coming soon).

Yes — the "Engage & earn" panel on the Referrals & Socials tab awards 100 soft tokens for each of our YouTube videos you like, comment on, or share. Likes and comments are verified automatically when you connect your Google account (we only check which of our videos you liked or commented on — nothing else); a comment must be a genuine, substantive one to count. For a share, you upload a screenshot, which we review before crediting. Note that these are soft tokens — unlike the permanent hard tokens from subscribing ("Follow & earn"), engagement tokens are per-cycle and may expire, and they have no cash value. Please engage genuinely: farmed or over-claimed activity can be flagged and denied.

Parts of the site are, and will stay so: every guide, every reference table, and three free trials of each premium tool. What is charged for is the calculating. That is because the site costs money to run and time to keep correct. There is a server and a domain to pay for every month, and a bill for the AI that reads a scanned prescription. The larger cost is not money at all: every rate table here was read out of a government notification and entered by hand, every calculator was checked figure by figure against the rules it implements, and each amendment means doing that again before anyone relies on the result. A wrong figure in a pay fixation or a pension case is a real problem for a real person, so that checking is not optional. The fee is what makes it sustainable to keep doing — it is priced as a contribution towards the work, not as a licence fee. If the cost is the obstacle, a token pack starts at ₹49 and the referral programme earns tokens that never expire.

Free suits occasional readers trying premium tools out (3 free trials per tool). Lite through Ultimate add growing monthly token quotas, saved calculations, PDF downloads and longer rollover — pick based on how often you calculate. Full details are on the Pricing page.

Yes — pay-per-use token packs (₹49–₹999) give you hard tokens that never expire, with no recurring subscription. This suits occasional, one-off calculations; saving forms and calculations still requires an active Lite plan or above.

Fees are generally non-refundable once paid, except where required by law or expressly stated at the time of purchase. See our Terms of Use for the full payments and refunds section.

Share your referral link with another government employee. When they sign up, they get 1,000 free hard tokens on top of their entry tokens. Your first 10 referrals earn you 1,000 hard tokens each; from the 11th referral onward, you earn 1,000 soft tokens each, added on your plan's usual rollover terms. To protect the privacy of the people you refer, your dashboard only ever shows you a masked initial of their name (for example, “M•••j”) and the date they joined — never their email address or full name.

The image is sent to a third-party AI service (OpenAI) to read the bill number, date, item names and amounts, and is never stored by us. No personal details from it are recorded. A pharmacy memo can carry a patient’s name, so a one-time notice explains this before your first scan, and you can black out anything on the image before it is sent — that happens in your own browser. It is optional: you can always type the bill in by hand instead. The medicine names read off your bill are added to the shared Medicine Reimbursement Database — names only, with nothing identifying you, the patient or your claim. This and the Medicine Reimbursement Database are the only two places on the site that upload an image anywhere. Every calculator takes typed figures and computes on our own server. Full detail is in section 12 of the Privacy Policy.

It doesn’t decide — it suggests, and the difference matters. There is no official list of approved medicines that we check against. Each entry comes from two things: a small set of general rules (items for external use such as creams, lotions, ointments, gels, sprays, balms, inhalers and ear or eye drops, and nutritional supplements, are ordinarily not reimbursable), and an automated AI assessment of the medicine itself. Neither can see what actually decides your claim — the referral, the recognition of the hospital, the approval of the treatment and the other conditions in the medical attendance rules. So treat an entry as a prompt to check, never as an answer, and never as a promise that a claim will be admitted. Searching is free. If a medicine is not in the database you can have it looked up for tokens; the price is shown before you confirm, and you are not charged if no answer can be produced. Whatever is found is saved, so the next person to search that medicine gets it free.

Account details (name, email, hashed password), figures you enter into calculators, calculation-activity/token records, limited transaction data from our payment gateway, basic technical data (IP, browser, device), and anything you share via the Contact form. Full detail is in our Privacy Policy.

We take reasonable technical and organisational measures to protect your information, as described in our Privacy Policy, but no system is completely secure. If a security incident affecting your personal data were to occur, we would take reasonable steps to contain it and, where required by applicable law, notify affected users and the relevant authority.

Yes. You can request deletion of your account and saved calculations at any time through the Contact page, subject to records we're legally required to retain (such as transaction records, or token logs needed to resolve an open dispute).

No. We do not sell your personal information. We only share it where necessary — with our payment gateway to process purchases, with infrastructure providers under confidentiality obligations, or where required by law.

Please let us know through the Contact page with as much detail as possible — the page, tool, and figures involved. We review and correct genuine errors as quickly as we can, though we can't guarantee a fixed turnaround.

Use the Contact form and select "Grievance redressal" as the subject, describing your concern about content, an account issue, or data handling. We aim to acknowledge and address grievances within a reasonable time, consistent with our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.

Our Terms of Use are governed by the laws of India, with courts at Shimla, Himachal Pradesh having exclusive jurisdiction over any dispute. See our Terms of Use for the full clause.

Use the Contact page for account, billing or content queries, or reach us on our WhatsApp channel and social pages linked in the header and footer.