Plotstead is a map of your own property with every asset on it, the paperwork attached to each one, and reminders for what falls due.
Lifestyle blocks, farms, rural properties, ordinary sections in town, rentals and baches. Four kinds of owner use it, and one kind of contractor.
A lifestyle block, a farm or a rural property
The house, the sheds, the woolshed, the bore, the pump, the septic tank, the trench the power runs down, the tractor, the boat. Half of it is buried and the other half is behind something.
Walk the line while the trench is open. Drop a pin at the pump. Write down which valve shuts the water off, because in four years you will not remember.
An ordinary section in town
No bore, no back paddock. Still a heat pump with a model number, a meter box, a fibre line under the lawn, two cars with WOFs and rego, rates in four instalments and an insurance renewal.
The map matters less here and the reminders matter more. Nothing has to have a position: a car is a record with dates on it and no pin at all.
A landlord with a rental
Smoke alarms with expiry dates, Healthy Homes obligations, and seven years of receipts you have to be able to follow back to a document.
Answer one question per asset, once: does this earn income? The cottage does. The family car never will. Then the year sorts itself into what is claimable and what is not, and the report names what you have not answered instead of quietly guessing.
The alarms come out as a document too. Narrow the register to the safety devices and you get every one of them, what kind it is, where it is, when it went in and when the battery expires, on a page you can print at the start of a tenancy.
Somebody who has just bought the place
Everything the last owner knew went with them. The register is how you rebuild it, one thing at a time, while you are out there anyway.
It works the other way too. Selling, and a buyer who is handed a complete plan of the place is being handed a reason to trust the rest of it.
Somebody who already uses Xero
Most people who need a ledger already have one. Plotstead is not a second one and does not want to be: no bank feeds, no GST returns, no reconciling.
Xero knows $1,240 left your account on the 12th. It does not know it was the bore pump on the western boundary, or that the manual is attached to that pin, or that the last one lasted nine years. Two records, two jobs, meeting once a year at the export.
The trades who work on it
Two ways round, and they are different jobs.
For a one-off, send a brief before they drive out: where the thing is, what it is, what has been done to it before, and no prices on it.
For somebody who keeps coming back, give them their own access. The pest control operator maps the bait stations themselves and sees the traps and nothing else.
One thing it is not
A survey. A pin is where a phone thought it was, and the photo underneath was flown on a day that is not today.
What all of them get
- A map of the place, on aerial imagery, with your boundary already drawn from your address.
- One record per thing: photos, serial numbers, manuals, and the plain sentence about how it works.
- Reminders for WOF, rego, insurance, rates, alarm expiry and services.
- It works with no signal and syncs when you are back in coverage.
- Your data back out, on every plan, including after a subscription lapses.