Planda Portal Product Update: July Edition

Last month we said we had three things coming: team access, a referral programme, and something new for post-submission. All three are now live. Here's what that looks like in practice, plus everything else we shipped.

Larger Home Extension Prior Approvals are now live

One of our most requested application types is now available to everyone.

You can now submit Larger Home Extension Prior Approval applications directly through Planda Portal, making it even easier to manage more of your work in one place.

We're continuing to expand the application types available and will keep rolling out more over the coming months.

Teams are here

You can now invite your colleagues to Planda Portal and work on applications together under a shared organisation. Admins can manage members, and everyone on the team has visibility across the same applications. If you're working in a practice or consultancy, this one's for you. Set up your organisation from your account settings today, and start inviting your team!

Tell a friend, earn £75

The referral programme is live. Share your unique link, and when a friend signs up and pays for three applications, you both get £75. Simple as that. Find your link in your account dashboard.

On the council side

We've been connecting with ALBPO (the Association of Local Planning Authorities Back Office) which represents planning departments across England and Wales. Getting in front of the right people in local planning is something we take seriously, and this is a meaningful step in building those relationships at scale. It means more councils know who we are, what we're building, and why it matters for how they receive and process applications. The more councils we're aligned with, the better the experience gets for you on the other end.

Partner API

We've quietly shipped something we're very excited about: a proper API that lets other platforms integrate with Planda Portal. Our first integration is with Resi, and more are in the pipeline. This is significant because nothing else in our space offers this kind of connectivity for architects. It means your practice management tools, design tools, and other platforms can start talking to Planda directly.

AI validation keeps improving

Our validation agent now remembers how each council typically behaves — what they flag, what they tend to accept — and uses that when reviewing your application. This is still a work in progress as we run tests to measure accuracy, but it's already making a difference.

What's next

A few things we're deep into right now:

Edit application. This is a big one. We're building a proper flow for responding to invalid letters and making changes to an application in-app — updating the address, topping up, changing application type, all of it. This has been one of your most-requested things.

Loyalty rewards. We're replacing the existing credits scheme with something more substantial. More details soon.

Comparables map improvements. The team ran an internal hackathon last month and came up with some strong ideas for the map. We'll be folding those in over the coming weeks.

As always, if you've got feedback, feature requests or something isn't working quite the way you'd expect, let us know. We read every message, and many of the updates you see here started as customer suggestions.