What's new
Last updated: 22 October 2026
What each release added, newest first, in the words of what the app can do now. The web app at app.plotstead.co.nz is always the newest; the phone apps follow within days. There is a feed if you would rather be told.
The Windows app, in the Microsoft Store
Plotstead for Windows is in the Microsoft Store, and signs in to the same account as the web app and the phones.
- Every popup has a close button in its top-right corner, which stays in view as you scroll a long one.
New map layers, and the whole world
The layers button on the map is a row of tiles now, one per layer with its own icon, and there are two layers to choose from that were not there before. Topo50 is the LINZ topographic sheet, with the tracks, huts and contours, and it prints. Outdoor is a drawn map of the whole world with roads, names, contours and buildings, from OpenStreetMap by MapTiler. The map's layers.
And Plotstead works outside New Zealand. Type your address anywhere and the map opens there on Outdoor. There is no LINZ parcel to fetch overseas, so you draw the boundary round the place yourself, a few taps on the corners, and the app sets your country and the currency your costs show in from the address. A magnifier on the map finds any address in the world and takes you there. Outside New Zealand.
- Placing a pin or finishing a run now asks "What's at this spot?" on the map itself. Add something new with a name and a kind without leaving the map, give the spot to something already in the register, or cancel and keep what you drew. The full sheet is a tap away on the card. Placing things.
- If a property has no country yet, Home says so, and one tap on the property's details puts it right: the country decides the map's layers, the units, what a vehicle suggests and the tax question. Your property's details.
- The property's details, name, address, boundary, country and currency, open from Settings as well as from the property's name on Home, and the country wears its flag.
- Overseas, a new vehicle suggests an inspection, a registration and an insurance renewal, the units start in acres where acres are used, and the printed map and the plate lookup know they are New Zealand's.
- The tax inside a cost is asked everywhere now, by your country's name for it and at its standard rate to start with: VAT in Britain, GST in Australia, sales tax in the United States. The name and the rate are on the property's details, and Not registered switches it off. The ledger spreadsheet's Amount column says its currency in the heading now, Amount (NZD), and the tax column your country's name for it. The ledger.
- The Ledger's tax years start when your country's do: 1 July in Australia, 6 April in Britain, 1 January in most of the world, and still 1 April in New Zealand. The day is on the property's details to change, and Settings shows the year in force. Tax time.
- The property's boundary opens for editing from its details: Edit the outline moves a corner at a time, Draw it again starts fresh, and Restore from LINZ puts the parcel back. On the map, Move all shifts a whole outline or area when it sits a few metres off. Your property's details.
- A place with no parcel can start from a square. The first screen on the map offers it beside drawing corner by corner, with Show me for the clip, and the bar shows the area as the corners go down, to check against the size on your title or rates notice. Placing things.
- The help's clips play at two thirds speed, and the Watch page on the website sorts them under four headings.
Home, arranged your way
Press Edit under the tiles on Home and arrange them. Drag a tile to where you want it, or tap it and use the arrows. Make a tile one, two or three wide, which is worth doing for the Ledger once a year's figure gets long. The cross on a tile hides it, and it waits in More until the plus tile puts it back. Each property gets its own Home, you can copy one from another property, and Put it back as it was undoes the lot. Your layout is yours alone: it changes nobody else's Home, and it follows you to every device you sign in on. How arranging works.
- Light or dark, hectares or acres, and the cards you've put away now follow you between devices. Auto still follows each device's own setting, and Settings says beside each row whether it follows you or stays on the device. What follows you.
- Below the tiles, the plus tile holds switches for the sections, so Recently updated or By type can go if you never read them. Coming up always shows.
- The Ledger tile one wide shows the short figure, like $12k; wider, the full one.
The first screen knows who you are
The first screen says which account is signed in and has Sign out, so a shared tablet, or a second account, is never stuck at setup. And a property that is on its way waits on Home: if yours was set up on another device, or somebody has shared one with you, Home says it's coming and keeps checking, and offers to set up a different one only if you ask. Before, that moment showed the setup form, and a second property was easy to make by mistake.
- Add a second property on the free plan and the screen says where Plotstead Plus is, rather than a bare refusal.
- The first screen carries the same picture Sign in does, and on a wide screen the form sits beside it instead of off to the right.
- A deleted property's calendar feed stops answering, and closing an account works for anyone who ever made a calendar feed.
The money ahead, month by month
The Ledger has a Forecast tab: what you've told Plotstead is coming, laid out like your entries, a row for every day something lands, for the next one, two or three years. It's built on the calendar in Coming up, the same reminders and jobs on the same days, carried forward and added up. Switch Coming up to Calendar to see a month at a glance.
- Every reminder with an amount and every job with an estimated cost lands on its days: the weekly rent four times a month, the insurance in its month, a job's figure marked as an estimate.
- The month you're in starts with what you've already recorded, so it reads as the whole month.
- Months where a lot goes out are marked Heavy, at twice your average month or at a figure you set in Settings, under Money.
- Export it as a PDF for the accountant or the bank, or as a spreadsheet. The first three months are on any plan; the rest, and the PDF, are part of Plotstead Plus. What the forecast counts.
Also: Expected counts jobs with an estimated cost, both tabs have their own filters, and on a phone the Ledger's and the Work log's four tabs sit in two rows.
More of the map on paper, and all of it on screen
The printed map can now leave your neighbours faded and show where their land begins.
- Boundary on the print panel has a third choice, Stencil: your outline stays and everything outside it fades, so your place stands out like a cut-out.
- Parcels draws the title lines from LINZ over the page, the neighbours' and the road's. They are indicative, not a survey, and the panel and the page both say so. Why they aren't exact.
- The panel labels each row and keeps your choices while you move the map, and Export stays in reach at the bottom.
- Full screen on the web and on Windows: the map takes the whole window, and Escape brings it back.
Also: popups fade in as they open, with Reduce motion in Settings to turn that off; the sign-in screens open with a picture of what Plotstead is for; and a card on the buttons on the map.
The iPhone app, in TestFlight
The iPhone app is open to testers. Join the beta from your phone, and it installs through Apple's TestFlight app.
- The same app as Android and the web: the map, the register, reminders, the ledger, the documents, offline.
- Everything from 1.6 on, for anyone who had an earlier test build: the job brief, archive, photos on a job, the phone book as a choice, and the map on paper.
- Sign in with the account you made on the web or on Android; it is one account everywhere.
The map on paper
Press the printer button on the map and the view on your screen comes out as a PDF page.
- A4 or A3, portrait or landscape, north up on the aerial imagery.
- Every area named, a scale bar, the kinds of thing on the page as a key, and the imagery credited.
- Switch some kinds off first and they stay off the page, so the contractor gets the water and not the car.
- Part of Plotstead Plus, like the briefs and the register. How it works, and a clip of it.
Also: while you draw an area's outline, Save keeps what you have so far without leaving the map, so a long boundary can be done a few corners at a time.
Your contacts are yours to share, or not
Whether somebody sees your phone book is now the fifth question on their card, beside costs, private things, kinds and whose work.
- On for family and whoever does your books. Off for the one contractor with no business in it.
- Somebody given access from their own contact card still sees their own name on the work you give them, and nothing else from the book.
- What each person can see.
What a role may do
- An editor archives an asset, a person or a contact. Only an owner deletes one, and a finished job is the owner's to delete too, because the work log is the record.
- The People screen says what owner, editor and viewer each mean, and what an invitation comes with.
- An invitation is accepted only by the address it was sent to.
- Access given from a contact card starts with costs and private things off, as a contractor's should.
Photos on a job
- A job has its own photos and documents: the fault before, and the work as it was left.
- They print on the job's brief, so whoever is doing the job sees what you saw.
- On a new asset or a new job, the first photo saves the sheet for you.
- The button is now "Create a brief".
Sold or scrapped? Archive it
- Archive takes an asset off the map, out of the register and out of the pickers. Every cost, job and photo on it keeps its name, so "what did the old ute cost me" is still a question the ledger can answer. Bring it back any time.
- The register's filters can show the archived on their own.
- A service is a job, not a reminder. The things a type suggests when you add it are now sorted into dates to notice and work to do.
- When something is sold or scrapped.
A job can say what it is, and hand itself over
- A job has a details box, and the work log shows what it holds.
- The job brief: one page with the job on top, the thing it is on underneath, the map, what has been done before, and no prices. What you can hand somebody.
- A reminder ticked off weeks late offers to record the cycles it stepped over, and never does so unless you press it.
- Snapping on the phone's map, with a switch, the way the web had it: a point aimed near a pin, a corner or a wall lands on it.
Which way the money goes
- Every ledger entry says whether the money came in or went out, and you can say so yourself. Rent received sits beside what the place costs to run.
- Unpaid money shows in amber whichever way it was going, and the month's footer shows in, out and net.
- One filter row on Assets, Ledger, Work log and Coming up.
- Home orders itself by what needs you today.
Work that comes round, and the first documents
- A job can repeat. Set the cycle and ticking it off writes the next one, dated on the same cycle, while the finished one stays finished with its date, its person and its cost.
- A reminder is a date to notice. Ticking it off moves it to the next date, and it never turns into work.
- The register as a dated asset schedule, and a brief for a contractor with the map drawn on it: the first two documents.
- Archive a person who has moved on: off the pickers, still on every record that names them.
- The ledger has from and to dates, a search box, a Filters sheet, and "Not paid yet" on a cost.
Photos, properly, and a backup you can keep
- A media library for the property, with thumbnails and a full-screen view.
- Keep a whole property's photos on the phone for offline, under a size you set.
- A photo added on the web turns up on the phone without being asked for.
- Take a copy of a property as a file, pictures included, and put it back from the welcome screen.
- A photo taken out of coverage waits on the phone and goes up when there is signal.
The ledger adds itself up
- Money in and money out, as a journal, with a month that totals itself.
- Who the money was with, as a filter and as a column of totals.
- Totals include GST, because nothing downstream can tell.
- Owner, editor and viewer, named where they are handed out.
Share without sharing all of it
- Choose what each person sees: costs, private things, which kinds of thing, and whether they see everyone's work or only their own.
- Mark anything private, and its reminders, jobs and costs go with it.
- Give a contact access from their card; they stay in your contacts.
- Assign a reminder to someone.
- Plus covers ten people on a property.
The first release
- Type your address and your boundary arrives from LINZ onto aerial imagery of your own place.
- Pins, runs and shapes for the things on it: the pump, the pipe, the shed. Walk a line with GPS, or aim with the crosshair.
- One record per thing, with its photos, documents, serial numbers and notes.
- Reminders with New Zealand's rules built in: WOF, rego, insurance, rates, smoke alarms, septic pump-outs.
- A vehicle from its plate.
- Everyone you would have to ring, in one list.
- Works offline on the apps, and syncs when you are back in coverage.
- Web, Android and Windows, with iPhone in testing.