Frequently asked questions

Vestly has two plans. Core is $12 AUD/month or $99 AUD/year and covers tracking the property: cashflow, tax position, CGT, depreciation, trust and SMSF holdings, bulk import, readiness questions, checks, verification and every calculator. Pro is $16 AUD/month or $129 AUD/year and adds generating, downloading and sharing the user's own FY 2025-26 tax pack from their records, plus the supporting AI tools. New customers can start with a 14-day free trial for new customers, no card required. Add a payment method to continue after the trial; otherwise it ends without a charge. The user reviews and verifies final figures before lodging or sharing. GST included, generally tax-deductible. For scale: published fee guides put a mainstream Australian agent at about $300 to $350 for an individual return that includes one rental property (Beyond Accountancy $308, H&R Block from $334, ITP $350), with a per-property add-on of roughly $40 to $200 beyond the first. The public calculators stay free without an account.

No. Some competitors charge upwards of $365 just to onboard, and TaxTank charges about $180 a year before you see anything. Vestly has no setup fee or onboarding charge. Core is $12/month and Pro is $16/month. New customers can start with a 14-day free trial for new customers, no card required. Add a payment method to continue after the trial; otherwise it ends without a charge.

Vestly is built for Australians who own a residential rental property - most often one property, held in their own name, with a loan on it, that they have never lived in. If tax time means digging through a year of emails and bank statements, this is for you. All tax calculations are aligned with ATO rules for the current financial year (FY 2026-27) across all 8 states and territories. It is not built for renters, commercial investors, or non-residents.

Your EOFY tax pack: rental income, expenses by ATO deduction category, loan interest, Div 40 and Div 43 depreciation and any CGT events, generated from the records you kept during the year, as a watermark-free PDF and CSV. Keeping those records is what Core covers; Pro adds the generated pack, its downloads and sharing. You review and verify every figure before you lodge or share it.

That is not what Vestly is for. Vestly is about the tax side: what the property earned, what it cost, what is deductible, and getting that into a pack before you lodge. It does happen to keep tenancy and lease records, rent payments and a maintenance log, because those feed the tax picture - but if you have an agent, keep them. Nothing in Vestly assumes you self-manage.

You enter your employment income and Vestly calculates your total taxable income by adding rental income and subtracting deductible expenses (including loan interest, rates, management fees, depreciation, and more). It then estimates your tax payable using the current ATO individual tax rates and shows your tax saving from negative gearing.

No. Vestly is a planning and tracking tool, not a registered tax agent or licensed financial adviser. Every figure is an estimate calculated from the data you enter and the ATO's published FY 2026-27 schedules. For your actual tax return, and for personal financial advice, consult a qualified Australian accountant or adviser.

Enter a hypothetical sale price and selling costs. Vestly calculates your capital gain (sale proceeds minus cost base), applies the 50% CGT discount if the property has been held for more than 12 months, then estimates the additional tax payable at your marginal rate.

Vestly's AI works on your records: the AI document importer turns statements and spreadsheets into draft records, receipt photo scan extracts the amount, date and vendor, document auto-tagging files what you upload, depreciation-schedule ingest reads a Quantity Surveyor PDF, and the FY tax narrative explains your tax year in plain English. These supporting AI tools are included with Vestly Pro at $16/month. Built on Claude with strict prompt-injection defence and 'never make up numbers' grounding rules.

Yes. Vestly is hosted on Australian servers (Sydney) with row-level security, so your data is isolated from other users at the database level. File storage uses private buckets with short-lived signed URLs. We never sell or share your data.

That works, and it does not cost more. Add as many as you own - held in your own name, jointly, or through a trust or SMSF - and the dashboard aggregates cashflow, equity, yield and tax across them, with one tax pack covering the lot. Most people who use Vestly own a single rental, so that is the case everything is designed around first.

Council rates, water rates, strata/body corporate, insurance, repairs & maintenance, property management, advertising, cleaning, gardening, pest control, land tax, legal/accounting fees, depreciation (Div 40 and Div 43), loan interest, and other.

Yes. Your FY tax summary - the tax pack, organised by ATO deduction category with interest totals, Div 40/43 depreciation and CGT events - is generated from your records on the Tax pack page, then printed or saved as PDF, downloaded as CSV, or shared read-only. Core keeps the records and the readiness checks; Pro turns them into the pack.

Pick a property and enter a new rate. Vestly shows your new P&I repayment, monthly and annual savings, break-even point including switching fees, and 10-year net savings. It also flags that your deduction drops when the rate does, so you see the real after-tax saving.

Yes. The serviceability calculator models bank-style borrowing capacity using the APRA buffer (assessment rate ~9% rather than your actual rate), shades rental income to 80%, and factors in existing loans and credit card limits. It is indicative, not a pre-approval, but gets you close to what a broker will quote.

Yes. Pick the property, set the new weekly rent and effective date, and Vestly generates a print-ready notice with the correct minimum notice period and frequency rules for your state (NSW, VIC, QLD, WA, SA, TAS, ACT, NT).

Yes. The dashboard shows upcoming reminders for lease expiries, insurance renewals, rent reviews, refinance opportunities (rates above 6.8%), and land tax season for NSW/VIC/QLD/SA based on when notices are typically issued.

Yes. Every property has an ownership percentage. Cashflow, equity, deductions, and tax figures throughout the app are all calculated against your share. Your tax pack also labels ownership % and ownership structure so you can review how each figure maps to the return.

Not hard, and you do not start from scratch. On the Properties page click "Import", download the template, paste in your existing CSV, Excel or even a Word table, and bulk import up to 200 properties at once. Each row is validated and a preview shows exactly what will be imported before anything saves. Most people are up and running in about ten minutes. Unlike a spreadsheet, Vestly then keeps your tax brackets, stamp duty and depreciation current so one stale formula does not quietly cost you for years.

The ATO requires rental records to be kept for 5 years, and for CGT purposes effectively for the whole time you own the property plus 5 years after you sell. Every record in Vestly - income, expenses, receipts, capital works with photos - stays organised for exactly that long-horizon job, which shoeboxes and old spreadsheets handle badly. Nothing you upload is ever aged out or deleted by us.

Yes, and this is the common case. A manager’s annual statement covers rent and their own fees, but not your loan interest, insurance, rates you pay directly, depreciation, or the substantiation the ATO expects. Those are yours to assemble, and they are exactly what the tax pack pulls together. Keeping an agent and keeping good tax records are separate decisions.

Yes, though it is a side room rather than the main event. Vestly hosts a curated catalogue of Australian investment properties direct from developers. Filter by state, property type, bedrooms and price ceiling, see projected weekly rent and gross yield on every card, and use the one-tap 'Run your own numbers' link to open the Planner with the listing's price and state pre-filled. Enquiries go straight to the developer - no rep in the middle, no marketing list. Browsing the catalogue is included with Vestly Core and Vestly Pro.