What's new

Photos get their own list, same as videos

Last time we gave videos their own list behind the VIDEO tile. Photos now work the same way, so the two tiles behave alike. Once a van has photos, tapping PHOTO opens the Photos list: a big green Take a photo button at the top, Choose from your photos under it, then every photo on that van, newest first, each with the time it was taken. Anything that arrived since you last looked carries a New mark. Tap a photo to see it full size, close it and you are back in the list.

With no photos yet, PHOTO still opens the camera straight away, nothing extra to tap.

Update on demand from More

The app only ever offered a new version when it happened to notice one, and if you use it in the browser rather than installed on your home screen, you could go a long while without seeing that offer. Now there is an Update card at the bottom of More. It shows the date, time and build your device is running, and one button, Update now.

Tap it and the app fetches the newest version, installs it and reloads on its own, no question asked. If you are already current it says so and leaves things as they are. If you are offline it says that too and changes nothing. Your vans, notes, photos and recordings stay on the device throughout, the update only swaps the app's own files.

Capture: your notes show up as they arrive, videos have their own list, and new things are marked

Three fixes in one, all on the Capture screen. First, the screen now refreshes itself when a sync finishes. Before this, a transcript or a note that reached your phone while you were looking at a van stayed hidden until you left the van and came back. That is why a video could show its count while the Notes tab still said nothing.

Second, tapping VIDEO when you already have a recording no longer drops you straight into the camera. It opens a list of your videos for that van, each with when it was recorded, whether the transcript is done, waiting, or still on your phone, and the first lines of the transcript with a link to read the rest in Notes. A big green Record a video button sits at the top. PHOTO and HOLD TO TALK still go straight to work, because on a walk-through you want both hands free and one tap.

Third, anything that landed since you last looked at that van is marked. A green New pill sits on the note, recording or video, the tile counts turn green and say how many are new, and the Notes tab count turns green. Open the van again later and the marks clear. The marker is per phone, so the same van can look different on your partner's phone.

Quick notes light up when you tap them

The quick note chips on the Capture tab (Great layout, Feels cramped, Quality finish and the rest) always did save a note. Each tap added it to the Notes tab and fed the note signal in the Fit Score. What they did not do was show it. The chip looked exactly the same after the tap, so it felt like nothing happened.

Now a chip lights up once its note is on the van, and a short line under the heading explains what a tap does. Tap a lit chip again and the note is taken back. Notes you typed yourself are not touched. If a quick note was saved twice on an older version, tapping the chip removes one copy per tap.

One address for the app: everyverdict.com/vanverdict/app

The app now lives at one address, everyverdict.com/vanverdict/app. Anything that still points at vanverdict.com/app, a bookmark, a link in an old email, a password reset or a payment return page, is sent straight to the same page on the new address. Nothing you saved on your account is affected. Sign in once on the new address and your vans, quotes and shortlist sync down as usual.

Two things to check. If you installed the app to your home screen from vanverdict.com, open it once so it can hand over, then install it again from the new address. And if you had inspections on your phone that never synced (you were signed out, or offline), they cannot be reached through vanverdict.com/app any more. Email support@everyverdict.com and we will help you recover them.

What if: ask a question of the numbers before you ask the dealer

What if is a new page, in the sidebar on a desktop. Pick one of your vans and the page shows it as you recorded it: the price and its basis, the ATM, tare, payload and ball weight, and your Tow Match against your own tow vehicle. Then type over any figure to ask a question. What if the dealer came down to $78,500? What if the ATM were 3,300 kg? What if I had a car rated to tow 3,000 kg instead of 3,500, or fitted a GVM upgrade, or carried another 150 kg of gear? What if I added an awning at $2,400 and 35 kg? The right hand side recomputes the true cost on the road, the weights and every Tow Match margin, with the recorded figure, the what-if figure and the change side by side.

Three things to know. Nothing you type here is saved to the van or sent anywhere. It is a question, not a capture, and Reset all clears it. A what-if weight is not a plate reading, so Tow Match can warn on it in amber but will never call the rig illegal on a number you made up. And where you never recorded a figure, the recorded column says unknown, and stays unknown. We do not fill gaps with guesses.

What it is not. The page can swap a number and show you the arithmetic from figures you hold. It cannot tell you which van to buy or what a dealer will accept. Registration, CTP and stamp duty are reference figures, to be confirmed with your dealer or state authority, and the weights are yours to verify on the compliance plate and a weighbridge.

Check the contract before you sign it

Contract check is a new page, in the sidebar on a desktop and under Settings on a phone. Pick the van, upload the dealer's order form, contract of sale, quote or deposit receipt (a PDF, or photos of each page, up to six files), and work through fifteen things that go wrong between the handshake and the delivery: is the exact van identified with a VIN or chassis number, is every agreed option written in rather than "as per brochure", is there one total price and what does it include, is the deposit refundable, can the price rise before delivery, is there a delivery date and what happens if it slips, cooling-off, cancellation, warranty, the weights, itemised inclusions, trade-in, subject to finance, a pre-delivery inspection, and whether it is dated, signed and free of blank fields. Each point says why it matters. The ticks are yours: only you can confirm a point against the actual paper, and the page keeps count.

If you like, press "Read the contract" and we read the document once and say what it appears to contain against each of the fifteen points: found, missing or unclear, with the wording it relied on. Above the checklist it sets out the parties, the van, the total price and its basis, the deposit and whether it comes back, the balance, the dates and every option the document lists. Below, it quotes the clauses that shift risk onto you, so you can ask the dealer what each one means and get the answer in writing. Beside each point your own record is shown, the figures you measured or were told, so the paper can be checked against them. A read is a Buyer Pass feature and counts against your pass's AI allowance. If the read comes back incomplete or the file is not a purchase document, nothing is charged.

One thing to be clear about. This is a reading aid, not legal advice, and the decision to sign is yours alone. The checklist and the read are general information. They can miss a clause or misread a figure. VanVerdict and its team are not responsible for the contract you sign or for anything it does or does not contain. Validate every point yourself, ask the dealer to put anything missing in writing, and if you are in any doubt ask a solicitor or your state or territory consumer protection body before you pay a deposit. Uploaded documents are stored with your other captures, are sent to our AI provider only when you ask for a read, and go when you delete them or the van.

Compare on a wide screen, with the evidence one click away

On a laptop or desktop, Compare is now a proper table. Up to five vans sit side by side as columns, with every specification you have captured as a row: size and weight, electrical, water and gas, layout, construction, then price, and at the bottom our assessment of each van. Pick which vans to show with the buttons above the table. The spec names stay put as you scroll sideways, and the van names stay put as you scroll down.

Every cell says where its figure stands. A tick means you measured it or read it off a document. An exclamation mark means it is still a claim, from a brochure, a website or a salesperson, that nobody has confirmed. Two arrows mean two sources disagree, and a cross means the figure fails one of your Buyer Profile requirements. Each state has a word next to the symbol, so it reads the same whatever your screen or your eyesight does with colour.

Click any figure and the Evidence Drawer opens on the right. It lists every piece of evidence behind that one number, who or what said it and when, and marks the ones that differ from the figure shown. Where two sources disagree you can settle it there: choose which figure is the final configuration and the table updates at once. The earlier evidence is kept, so you can always see what changed and why. Click an advertised price or a best quote and the drawer lists the quotes behind it instead, with links to Quotes and Prices.

Compare Quotes gets the same treatment. Up to four quotes become columns, and every line a dealer wrote becomes a row: base price, each fitted option, delivery, inclusions, discount, trade-in and the final figure. An option one dealer priced and another left off shows as "Not listed" rather than disappearing, so the lowest total cannot hide a missing inclusion. Phones keep the ranked list and the two-quote picker they have now.

Prices: what was advertised against what you were told

There is a new Prices page, in the desktop sidebar between Quotes and Catalogue and one tap from Compare Quotes on a phone. For every van you have recorded it lines up three figures side by side: the price the maker or dealer publishes, the price you wrote down on the day, and the best quote a dealer has given you. Where a quote sits below the advertised figure it says by how much, and it says on what basis, because an advertised price rarely states whether on-road costs are in it.

Under the figures is a chart over time. Each catalogue observation of the advertised price is a point on the line, a change in the published specification is marked in orange, the price you recorded at inspection is a red diamond and each quote is a green square. Two dated figures are enough to draw it, and it grows on its own as we keep watching the maker pages and as you record more quotes. The catalogue reports are kept on your device, so the last known figures still show when you are offline.

None of this is blended into one number. An advertised price is what a public page said on the day we read it, a quote is what one dealer offered you, and the page says which is which every time. Check every figure with the dealer before you rely on it.

A proper desktop dashboard, and a new home for the app

VanVerdict started as a phone app for the show floor, and that is still where it shines. Now open it on a laptop or a wide screen and you get a full desktop layout instead of a stretched phone screen. A menu down the left side takes you straight to Shows, My Vans, your Shortlist, Compare, Quotes, the Catalogue, your Buyer Profile, the Buyer Report and Settings. The home screen becomes a dashboard: how many vans you have considered, inspected and shortlisted, which ones still need a follow-up, your current shortlist with fit and evidence at a glance, the next show on your calendar, and what you last worked on. Your phone keeps the layout you know, and everything you record in the field shows up on the desktop the moment it syncs.

The app is also moving to everyverdict.com/vanverdict/app/, alongside the rest of VanVerdict. The old address keeps working for now. The first time you open the new one, sign in again, and your vans come down from your account. If you had the app installed on your phone's home screen, install it again from the new address.

Add or change your name, and the app greets you properly

Your name could only be set when you signed up, so if you skipped it or typed it in a hurry you were stuck with it. Now open More, and next to your name in the Account card tap "Change" (or "Add your name"). The home screen and our emails use your first name with a capital letter, so "sam" gets "Hi Sam". Leave the name empty and we simply say "G'day".

Change password in More now works

The Change password card in More sent your request in a form the server could not read, so every attempt failed and no password was changed. That is fixed. If you tried before and gave up, your old password is still the one that signs you in.

Your name stays off the Buyer Report unless you want it there

Plenty of buyers forward the report to a dealer, an inspector or a mate who knows vans. So the top of the report now says "Prepared with VanVerdict" instead of your name and email. If you do want them on it, tick "Show my name and email on the report" next to the Download button before you print or save the PDF. It is off every time you open the report, so you never send your email somewhere by accident.

Tow Match no longer says "Against" with nothing after it

If your tow vehicle has its weights filled in but no make or model yet, Tow Match now reads "Against your tow vehicle", in the app and in the Buyer Report.

The Buyer Report summary fits on your phone

On a phone the summary table in the Buyer Report was a squeeze. Give a van a long name, like "The grey one near the entry", and it wrapped one word per line down a narrow column, and the Verdict column fell off the edge of the screen. On a phone each van is now its own small card: the name across the top, then price, pass rate, checks and verdict underneath, one per line. On a tablet or a computer you still get the table, and the PDF keeps it too, because on paper a table is the easiest way to compare.

While we were in there, the Tow Match part of the report no longer prints "- of -" for a check it can't do yet, such as the rear axle on a car that has no axle limit on its plate. It now says can't check yet and tells you what figure would make it work, in the app and in the PDF.

Prices in your Buyer Report read like prices

Type 87990 into a price box and the Buyer Report used to print it back as 87990, which is hard to read at a glance and looks a bit rough on a page you hand to a dealer. Now it shows as $87,990, in the report on screen and in the PDF alike: the quoted price, the price column in the summary table, base price, discount and final price on a dealer quote, and the price you paid. Your van list and the note that you already have a van show it the same way. Anything you typed with words in it, like "87,990 drive away" or "POA", is left exactly as you wrote it, because in the report a price is evidence and we don't change evidence.

Tow Match tells you what it is missing, and your tow vehicle saves as you type

Some of you entered a GCM and still saw Tow Match come back with nothing, or with a note saying a van figure was not recorded when the gap was in fact on the car. That was on us. Every check in Tow Match now says exactly which figure it needs, whether it belongs to your car or to the van, and when it is a car figure there is a link straight to the right spot in My Tow Vehicle, with that section already open. The usual one is kerb mass: GCM and GVM can't be worked out without it, or without a weighbridge figure for the whole rig. A check that can't run says Can't check yet and shows no half numbers.

My Tow Vehicle also saves as you type now. Before, a figure only saved once you tapped out of the box, so leaving the page straight after typing could lose it. Numbers with a comma or a space, like 2,740, are read properly too. And Tow Match fetches your latest tow vehicle each time it opens, so a change made on your phone shows on your tablet without any fuss.

Type a maker or a model and the catalogue narrows as you go

The catalogue now opens with a Make or model box. Type Jayco, or Snowy River, or a model name, and the list shrinks while you type: no button to press. Add a budget or a length and it narrows again, so you go from every van in the catalogue to the handful worth a look in a few seconds. The list sits right under the search now, and the finer filters (tow vehicle, ATM, solar, water, bed and the rest) wait behind More filters until you want them. Tap a van, come back, and your search is still there. If you are signed in there is also a new Catalogue button in the bar at the bottom of the screen, and the button that used to say Vans now says My Vans, because that is where the vans you have captured live.

One name per maker

A few makers showed up twice in the maker list, once under their short name and once under their full trading name. Snowy River and Snowy River Caravans, for example, were the same people with their vans split across two entries. Each maker now appears once, under the name they use on their own website: Snowy River Caravans, Ezytrail Caravans, Austrack Campers, Viscount Caravans and MDC. Every van they build sits under that one name with the maker's logo, and typing the short name still finds them.

Spot the van you are standing next to: maker logos and photos

On a show floor you look at the badge on the van before you read anything. Now the app works the same way. Every result in Find a Van carries a small photo of the van and the maker's logo beside its name, and each van's own page opens with the logo above the title. Scroll the list at the stand, match the badge, tap. The photos and logos come from the makers' own websites and belong to them, we only use them to show whose van it is. Not every maker has both yet. We collect a few more every night, gently, so the gaps fill in over the coming weeks without hammering anyone's website.

Every van has its own page, and you can tell us when a figure is wrong

Tap a van in Find a Van and you now get its own page, no account needed: the published price, every figure we hold and where each one came from, and the maker's photo where we have one. If you have stood next to that van and the ATM on the compliance plate says something else, press Suggest a correction, pick the figure, type what it should say and tell us where you saw it. Our team checks every suggestion before the listing changes, and the old figure stays in the history either way. There is also a Report a problem button for a listing that is doubled up or no longer made, and at the bottom of Find a Van you can tell us about a model we are missing. These are corrections, not comments: nothing you send is shown on the site, only the figure once we have checked it.

One home page for VanVerdict

There used to be two VanVerdict front pages, one on vanverdict.com and one here. Now there is one, the VanVerdict page, and vanverdict.com takes you straight to it. We kept the best of both: the demo video, the live list of brands already in the catalogue, and a feature by feature rundown. The app itself has not moved, it still opens at vanverdict.com/app.

Watch a whole buying day in under three minutes

The VanVerdict page now carries a narrated demonstration video, recorded on the live app on a phone with a demo account. It runs from sign-up to the finished Buyer Report: the tow vehicle, Find a Van, scanning a brochure at the stand, Tow Match, the checklist, Compare, and the PDF at the end. It is 2 minutes 44 seconds, and it downloads nothing until you press play.

Six small things found on a full walk-through

We recorded a complete buying journey on a phone, from sign-up to the PDF, and fixed what got in the way. The chat bubble now sits bottom right and lifts itself clear of the capture bar, so it no longer covers the Save and Next buttons. The Find a Van form no longer spills past the edge of a narrow screen. Compare shows a battery as the figure you recorded (12 kWh stays 12 kWh, it was being relabelled in amp hours).

Tow Match now says "van figure not recorded" instead of showing 0 kg against your limit when the van's ATM has not been captured yet. The catalogue picker's "figures held" count is now the real count for that model. And applying a catalogue model to a van you created a moment ago no longer fails while the van is still on its way to the server: the sheet fills from the model on the phone and syncs afterwards.

Buyer report redesigned: the verdict on the cover, one section per van

The PDF you download at the end of a buying journey has been rebuilt from the ground up. The cover now carries a verdict at a glance for every van you looked at: the price as quoted, how many checks passed, the Tow Match outcome and your own verdict as a coloured chip (Shortlist, Considering or Walk away). A journey page follows with a side by side comparison, pass rate bars, and a callout listing every place the compliance plate disagreed with the brochure or the salesperson.

Each van then gets its own section: a header band with the name, venue, date and quoted price, a two column spec sheet with a badge on every figure saying where it came from (Plate, Brochure, Typical for model or Said by salesperson), the full inspection checklist with a tick or cross on every item, promises split into "in writing" and "verbal only, not confirmed in writing", and a Tow Match panel with a bar for each limit and a plain English line on what it means. Body text is larger, every page carries a page number, and a blank second page that appeared on journey summaries without a chosen van has been fixed. The sample report on the VanVerdict page has been regenerated with the new layout.

Find a van that fits: filter the catalogue by what actually decides it

The shared catalogue of about 100 brands and almost 600 models can now be filtered by budget, length, ATM against your tow vehicle, battery and solar, fresh and grey water, hot water and gas, bed and frame. Set your limits once and the list shrinks to the vans worth walking to. It lives at vanverdict.com/app/find and needs no account to look, so you can send the link to whoever is coming with you.

Where a maker has not published a figure, it shows as not stated. A missing figure never hides a van from the list and is never quietly guessed, so a blank is a question to ask at the stand, not a reason the van disappeared. The VanVerdict page on everyverdict.com was rewritten at the same time to describe the redesigned Buyer Report: verdict on the cover, one page per van, a tow match panel and an evidence trail under every figure.

Three small things that matter on a show floor

Weight fields (tare, ATM, GTM, ball weight, payload) now bring up your phone's number pad instead of the full keyboard, one less thing to fight while holding a brochure. Fields that genuinely carry letters, like battery and solar, keep the full keyboard.

The checklist now opens with every section folded to its headline and running count, so you see the whole shape of the inspection at a glance and open one section at a time, instead of scrolling a wall of 29 items. And the hold-to-talk button no longer gets confused by a very quick tap: if you release before the microphone has woken up, nothing records. Before, that tap could quietly leave the recorder running.

Keep, maybe or walk away now actually decides something

The evening review ends with one question: keep, maybe, or walk away. Until now that answer was stored and then quietly ignored. Now it does what you meant. "Keep" shortlists the van, so it wears the star on My Vans and rises in your ranked list. "Walk away" marks it rejected. "Maybe" leaves it in the considering pile. One tap at night, and your list next morning already reflects it.

Two more review fixes ride along. Your review answers no longer count against the inspection checklist, so walking away from a van never shows up as a "failed check" with a strange label in your comparison. And the review now covers the whole week, not just yesterday: at a three or four day show, the vans you captured on day one still wait for you on the final night. On show days, the Home screen's show card also carries a direct "Review captured vans" link whenever some are still undecided.

Van to van with fewer taps: the show-day loop is now a loop

On a busy show floor the app should move at walking pace. Three changes make it do that. First, "Finish & Next Van" at the bottom of a capture now takes you straight to the QR scanner for the next van, instead of dropping you back on your list. Second, the Home screen's big buttons ("Start capturing" on show day, "Add Van" otherwise) open the scanner first, because pointing your camera at a price board beats typing on your feet. Search stays one tap away on the scanner itself, and the home-screen shortcut does the same.

Third, the Find a Van buttons now follow what you are doing. With the form empty, the zero-typing "Skip details" fast path is the big green button. The moment you type a make or pick a model from the catalogue, "Create New Van" becomes the primary action and moves above the keyboard, so the button you actually want is never buried under it.

The app now opens with no signal at all

Your captures were always saved to your phone, but there was one gap: if your phone closed the app on a show floor with no reception, reopening it could bounce you to the welcome screen instead of your vans. Exhibition halls are exactly where mobile networks fall over, so that was the wrong place to have a weak spot.

Fixed. Once you have signed in on a device, the app now remembers who you are and opens straight onto your own data, signal or not. Your vans, your show plan and your captures are all right there, and everything syncs the moment you get reception back. Signing out, and only signing out, is what removes the account from the device.

The Show Planner: pick your exhibitors before show day

Every show in the Shows list now opens into its own planner. Where we hold the exhibitor list, and for the bigger shows we do, you search it, tap the ones you want to see, and each lands in My Plan with its site number already attached. On the day, tick each one off as seen. The Home screen knows when a show is on and puts your plan one tap away.

No exhibitor list yet for your show? Open the event's own website, and add the stands you care about by hand: brand, site number and a note. It takes seconds per entry and it is exactly the homework that turns a chaotic show day into a route. Your plan is saved on your phone and works at the show even with no signal once you have opened it once, and it syncs to your account so a linked partner sees the same plan.

Photo reads now fill in the van's name, manufacturer and model too

A brochure or spec board nearly always names the van, and the photo read was already seeing it. It just never made it back to your notebook: only the weights, dimensions and prices did. So a van captured as "Unknown Van" stayed unknown even after a perfectly good read.

Now, when you tap "Use these" on a photo read, the van's name, manufacturer and model fill in as well. The same rule as everything else applies: it only fills what you left blank, and never overwrites anything you typed yourself. If you have a van sitting on "Unknown Van", open its photos and run "Read specs from these photos" again.

The Van Report: price history, spec changes and the quoted range for any model

Pick any model from the catalogue and get its full story on one page: every advertised price we have observed, a small graph of the price over time, and the latest move shown plainly as an arrow with the dollar and percentage change. When a price moved because the specification changed, the report says so, with a line-by-line list of what changed. A spec change is never dressed up as a discount or a price rise.

Below the history sits what other buyers have actually been quoted for the same model, grouped by basis (drive-away, tow-away and so on) and always shown as a range or a median, never as any one buyer's own figure. Find it in the app under More, then Van Report.

Read specs from a photo, any time, not only when you attach it

Until now the automatic spec read only ran the moment a photo was attached. If that read failed, or the photo was taken before the feature existed, there was no way to try again. Now every van's photo section has a "Read specs from these photos" button, and opening a photo full screen offers "Read specs from this photo" for exactly that one.

The reason this matters: some earlier reads of perfectly legible price boards failed silently because the answer was cut short mid-read. That cut-off is fixed, so a photo that "found nothing" back then will very likely fill your spec sheet now. As always, nothing is written to your van until you tap "Use these".

"Running low" credit warning showed for accounts that never topped up

The AI top-up balance in Settings warned "running low" when the balance was exactly zero, which is the normal state of every account that has never bought a top-up. It read as if your AI features were about to stop, when your plan allowance still covered everything. The warning now only appears when you have topped up and the remainder is genuinely low, under a dollar.

Old-style links to newer app pages were hitting a 404

When the app moved to vanverdict.com/app, links to the old root addresses were redirected, but the list missed the newer pages: My Tow Vehicle, Review, the partner reconcile page and a few others landed on a 404 instead. Every app page now redirects properly from its old address, including addresses with an id in them.

Buyer Report cover was showing an old logo, Car Verdict reports showed the wrong brand entirely

The new cover page shipped earlier today with a logo that had already been replaced everywhere else in the app, an old mark instead of the current one. It's now the same logo you see when you sign in.

Fixing it also caught a second problem: every Car Verdict Buyer Report was showing VanVerdict's branding on its cover instead of its own, since both apps share the same report engine. Car Verdict reports now correctly show Car Verdict branding, and the sample report on this site has been regenerated to match.

Your Buyer Report now opens on a proper cover page

The PDF you export at the end of a shortlist used to start straight into a wall of text, no logo, no colour, and the buying journey table could land halfway down whichever page came before it. It now opens on its own cover: the VanVerdict logo, the report title, and your chosen van's fit score shown as a bar rather than a line of text buried in a paragraph.

The buying journey comparison now always starts on its own page instead of spilling across the chosen van's detail pages, and every colour in the report matches the app's own brand palette instead of a set of placeholder colours nobody chose on purpose. Every page now carries a page number too.

VanVerdict now has its own home at vanverdict.com

Until today, vanverdict.com went straight to the sign-in screen. There was nowhere to see what the notebook actually does before you were asked to create an account. Now the domain opens on a proper overview page: what the app captures, a real screenshot walkthrough, a sample Buyer Report, the full feature list, and a live count of the brands and models already in the catalogue.

The app itself hasn't moved anywhere in spirit, just in address. It now lives at vanverdict.com/app. Any bookmark to the old sign-in or welcome screen still works and takes you straight through.

My Tow Vehicle could come up blank on a fresh session

On a brand new device, or after clearing your browser storage, opening My Tow Vehicle for the first time could show an empty form for a moment while your saved details were still loading from the server, and in a small number of cases that empty state got saved over the real one.

The page now waits for your saved data to actually arrive before it decides there is nothing there. If you were affected and your tow vehicle details look wrong, open My Tow Vehicle and re-enter them, then check Tow Match still shows the result you expect.

Real screenshots throughout the guide

The user guide now shows the actual app at every step, including the Tow Match result panel, instead of a description standing in for a picture.