Four months ago, we officially launched Planda Portal into a planning system that hadn't experienced necessary and meaningful change in two decades - one where, on average, half of all applications submitted to councils come back invalid before they're even properly assessed. An underlying catalyst for this preventable bottleneck is the data involved, which has been held under a restricted monopoly for years, limiting space for the innovation needed to keep up with growing demand, increasingly complex projects and declining planning recruitment. From day one, our AI validation engine, AVA, which is built into Planda Portal’s interface, has been built to close that gap: catching application issues before submission, not after.

Four months on, we're proud of how far things have come - and here's everything that's happened along the way.

Build, Ship, Repeat

We shipped fast, and paid attention to the feedback that came back from agents, planning consultants and applicants - the people using our platform every day. In our first feature wave back in March, only six weeks in, we gave users more control over their workspace: the ability to archive finished applications, upload their own custom location plans (validated just the same as ours), and pick the right application type quickly and confidently from the very start. By April, we'd reshaped the AI validator to better suit our end-to-end submission process for users - a new model and a redesigned interface. This is also where the council dashboard became a working prototype, off the back of LPA feedback we received during our live roadmap discussion. May brought a new site picker that removes manual boundary drawing almost entirely, plus an automatic CIL generator that's already cutting down on avoidable rejection letters. The council dashboard prototype received positive input from demoed councils.

And as we pass by June, this last month has seen the biggest and most exciting updates to the platform yet! The validator got smarter again: it's now factoring in what individual councils actually check - and just as importantly, what they don't - so the feedback you get is increasingly specific to the council you're submitting to, rather than a national checklist. Referrals are now built in - refer a friend, and once they sign up and pay for three applications over £100 each, you both earn £75. And in our opinion, the two best new features…

Feature one: Prior Approvals

We've started expanding what Planda Portal can actually submit. Prior Approvals for Larger Home Extensions launched in a deliberately controlled rollout - we wanted to watch closely how councils handled the new application type before opening it up further. So far, so good: our first prior approval has already been granted, with barely a day's delay on receipt. More application types are in the pipeline, opening up as we confirm councils are processing them consistently.

Feature two: Organisations

One of our biggest releases this month is Organisations & Teams, now fully live. Users can invite their team members directly during signup, making it faster to get a whole practice or company set up on Planda Portal from day one. The benefit here is about working the way teams actually work: applications, planning queries, and submissions are rarely a one-person job, so having colleagues set up under a shared organisation means less duplicated effort, better visibility across a team's applications, and a smoother onboarding experience for anyone joining an existing account rather than starting from scratch.

Connecting the system

Submission only matters if it reaches the right place, fast. Since March, we've been integrated directly with BOPS, the back-office system at the heart of the government's Open Digital Planning programme, so applications land structured and ready for action the moment they arrive. 

We're in active conversation with other back-office providers too, and we'll share more as those integrations come online. We have a connector soon to go-live with a large London council, and all will be revealed soon - keep your eyes peeled!

Council relationships

The council-facing side of Planda Portal has come a long way from an idea on a slide. We first introduced the concept at our debut webinar on 17 March - just four weeks after launch - where the Council Dashboard was the headline announcement to a room of 150 attendees. That idea is now a working dashboard: we started onboarding councils onto it in May, and we're now automating how they receive application payments. It's slower, relationship-led work - every council operates differently - but it's moving, and we're having more of these conversations every week. 

What architects and agents are telling us

Some of the best feedback has come straight from the people using Planda Portal every day. Anthony Minchella at TM Design  told us plainly that he switched because he wanted a tool that got out of his way - and the feature that's stuck with him most is the auto location plan, which fills in site area automatically instead of him calculating it by hand on every application. That feedback directly shaped our latest location plan upgrade.

Brian Strong, a high-volume agent at Home Countries Architectural Services, was even more direct: our AI validator wasn't doing much for him personally, because he already knows what councils want. Fair enough - that's exactly why we built the bypass option in the first place. What he did love was the colour-coded map view of all his applications at a glance: approved, draft, submitted. Feedback like Brian's is pushing us to keep refining the validator so it works just as well for veterans as it does for first-time applicants.

By the numbers

The numbers tell a consistent story - that applications received via Planda Portal are more likely to arrive valid. Our most recent (in)Valid Report put applicants' invalid rate at roughly 35%, against a reported 50% industry standard. Where our validator flags an issue, 96.4% of the time it had already caught it before the council did. Applications that pass every Planda Portal check go on to be validated by councils 85.8% of the time. Altogether, using our AI checks cuts the chance of getting an invalid letter by around 40%. And we’re not stopping there, our next goal is to bring the overall invalid rate down to 25%!

And just this week

Organisation accounts landed in production - a feature firms have been asking for since week one. Multiple people at the same company can now work from one shared account, with proper admin visibility across every application, the ability to reassign ownership when work moves between team members, and shared tracking instead of everyone working from their own login.

What's next

As usual, we have lots of developments on the Planda Portal horizon.

We will be announcing a connector partnership very soon, along with the council that this is going live with. 

Four months in, the mission hasn't moved: fewer invalid applications, less wasted time. What's changed is how we're getting there - built week by week, with the architects, agents, and councils actually using it.

- The Planda Portal Team