Terms of Use

ClearHold helps New Zealand residential landlords prepare their tax properly. It turns messy receipts, bank statements and property records into structured, accountant-ready workpapers with the evidence needed to support the result. These Terms of Use govern your use of the ClearHold web application at app.clearhold.nz and any related services (together, the "Service").

The Service is provided by ClearHold Limited, a New Zealand registered company of 173A St Heliers Bay Road, St Heliers, Auckland 1071. In these terms, "we", "us" and "our" mean ClearHold Limited, and "you" means the person who creates a ClearHold account.

By creating an account, you agree to these terms. If you don't agree, please don't use the Service.

1. Your ClearHold account

You need an account to use the Service. You must be 18 or older and authorised to manage tax information for the rental properties you add. You are responsible for the security of your login credentials and for any activity under your account. If you think someone else has accessed your account, tell us at security@clearhold.nz.

One account holder manages one subscription. Co-owners, look-through company (LTC) shareholders and partners don't get separate logins under a single subscription. The account holder manages the account on behalf of the ownership structure, and confirms they're authorised to do so.

2. What ClearHold is — and isn't

ClearHold is a record-keeping and calculation tool. It is not tax advice and we are not a registered NZ tax agent. You remain responsible for the accuracy of your tax filings. Please confirm your specific tax position with a registered NZ tax agent or accountant before filing.

The Service is designed to work alongside your accountant, not to replace them. Where our eligibility checks identify a situation we don't support, the Service routes you to an accountant rather than producing a file-ready result.

3. What ClearHold is built for — and what it isn't

ClearHold is built for NZ-resident landlords with long-term residential rental property held in one of these ownership structures:

• Individual name (sole ownership)
• Joint ownership with one other named individual co-owner, for example a spouse or partner
• Look-through company (LTC) ownership, subject to the eligibility constraints applied at signup and in the LTC ownership wizard

How many properties. Your subscription entitles you to up to three properties. While the Service is in its current release, multi-property support is switched off, so an account can hold one property at a time. We'll tell subscribers before this changes. If you hold more than one rental, please take that limit into account before subscribing.

ClearHold is not suitable, and we do not support, the following situations in the current version:

• Property held through a trust, ordinary company, or partnership, other than through an LTC that meets our eligibility constraints
• Short-stay or Airbnb-style accommodation, listed-services marketplace activity, boarding, or other GST-registered rental activity
• Mixed-use properties (e.g. a holiday home used privately for part of the year) and properties with private-use periods
• Commercial, industrial, or farm property
• Property owned by a non-resident or subject to Residential Land Withholding Tax (RLWT)
• Cross-border, rollover-relief, and relationship-property transfers
• Social housing or employee-accommodation arrangements
• LTC ownership outside our eligibility constraints, including trustee owners, an LTC owning another LTC, share changes part way through a tax year, LTC formation part way through a year, more than five owner records, a GST-registered LTC, an LTC in a partnership or joint venture with another LTC, or any other case the eligibility wizard flags for accountant review

If any of the above applies to your situation, ClearHold's outputs (including any IR3R or IR7 pack) may be incomplete or incorrect. You should use a registered NZ tax agent or accountant rather than relying on ClearHold alone.

ClearHold runs an eligibility check at signup and on an ongoing basis. If your circumstances change so that the wizard flags your situation as ineligible for self-filing, the Service will produce workpapers for your accountant to review rather than file-ready outputs.

3.1 Rent payment detection

ClearHold helps you see whether expected rent payments have landed in your connected bank feed. If a payment matching your saved rent expectation doesn't appear within a short grace period, we show you a factual observation about the bank feed and offer a way to record the payment manually if it arrived another way.

ClearHold does not:

• Send any notice to tenants, agents or other parties
• Issue a rent-arrears notice, breach notice, or any other legal notice on your behalf
• Advise on rent-arrears recovery, Tenancy Tribunal action, or any other step under tenancy law
• Act as a property manager or tenancy manager

This feature is record-keeping and cashflow visibility only. It is not a substitute for the rent-arrears framework under the Residential Tenancies Act 1986. If you need formal arrears or breach-notice action, use a registered property manager or get tenancy-law advice.

3.2 Document storage

You can upload supporting documents against a property: tenancy agreements, healthy-homes certificates, bond records, insurance certificates, loan documents and other records. Uploads are limited to PDF, JPEG, PNG, HEIC and HEIF files, up to 15 MB each. Documents you upload are included in your accountant pack and in your data export.

Document storage is a convenience feature attached to your records. It is not a backup service and not your statutory archive. You remain responsible for keeping your own copies of anything you're required to retain, for the period the law requires, including after you stop using ClearHold.

4. Subscription, billing, and cancellation

4.1 Pricing

Paid plans are billed monthly in New Zealand dollars, inclusive of GST. Standard rate: NZ$24.90/month. Founder rate: NZ$14.90/month, available until the cohort closes at 50 customers or on 31 March 2027, whichever comes first, and held for as long as your subscription stays continuously active.

4.2 Free trial

Both plans start with a free trial: 14 days on the Standard rate, 30 days on the Founder rate. Your card isn't charged until the trial ends, and you can cancel during the trial at no cost.

Your trial starts when you add your first property, not when you create your account. Creating an account is free, and if you don't add a property straight away your trial hasn't started running.

4.3 What's available during the trial

During the trial you have full access to the Service, including draft tax reports, cashflow, return-on-investment figures and every in-app feature. Draft packs are watermarked NOT FOR FILING and you can download them as often as you like to check the quality of the work.

On the Standard rate, generating a file-ready pack is enabled once your first payment is taken. A file-ready pack is the version with the watermark removed, intended for filing or for handing to your accountant, and it isn't available during the 14-day Standard trial. Founder-rate customers can generate a file-ready pack during their trial. If a file-ready pack before payment is what you need, the Standard trial won't give you that.

4.4 Payment, cancellation, and what happens if a payment fails

Payment is processed by Stripe. We don't store your card details; Stripe does. You can cancel at any time from your Billing settings; cancellation takes effect at the end of the billing period you've paid for, and you keep full access until then. See our separate Refund Policy for the no-questions refund window and what happens when you generate a file-ready accountant pack.

If a renewal payment fails, we'll retry it and contact you by email and in the app. Your account stays fully active during that grace period. From around day 14 it becomes read-only: you can still read and export everything, but not add or change records. From around day 30 it moves to cancellation-pending, which is reversible by paying the outstanding amount. After that, access ends. Throughout, your data stays yours and you can export it.

5. Your data

You own the data you put into ClearHold. We process it to provide the Service, in line with our Privacy Policy.

Export. You can request an export at any time from your account settings, and for at least 90 days after you cancel. The export is a ZIP archive containing your records as a CSV file, a PDF summary, and the documents you've uploaded. We prepare it in the background and email you a download link that stays valid for 7 days.

Where your data is stored. The Service runs on infrastructure outside New Zealand: application and database hosting with Railway, and file storage on Amazon Web Services S3 in Sydney, Australia. Protections in those countries may differ from New Zealand's, and we take reasonable contractual and technical steps to keep protection comparable. Our Privacy Policy sets out the detail.

6. Acceptable use

Don't use ClearHold to break the law, impersonate someone else, scrape or resell the service, probe our security, or do anything that interferes with other users. Don't upload data that isn't yours or that you don't have permission to upload, and don't use the Service to provide tax advice to other people as though you were a registered tax agent. We may suspend or close accounts that do.

7. Third-party services

We rely on these providers to deliver the Service: Akahu (NZ, bank feeds), Stripe (payments), Postmark (email), Railway (hosting), Amazon Web Services S3 (Sydney, file storage), Sentry (error monitoring), and Google Maps Platform with Addy Solutions (address autocomplete and property maps).

We're not responsible for these providers' availability or correct operation, though we'll choose reliable providers and tell you if one is meaningfully down. Your use of Akahu and Stripe is also subject to those providers' own terms.

8. Limitation of liability

To the extent permitted by the Consumer Guarantees Act 1993 and other applicable NZ law, our liability for any loss arising from your use of the Service is limited to the amount you paid us in the 12 months preceding the loss. Nothing in these terms limits your rights as a consumer under the CGA or the Fair Trading Act 1986.

9. Disputes and governing law

These terms are governed by New Zealand law. If you have a complaint, please contact support@clearhold.nz first, because we'd rather resolve it directly. Any dispute that can't be resolved that way will be escalated to the Disputes Tribunal or another NZ court of competent jurisdiction.

10. Service availability

We aim for the Service to be available all the time, but we don't guarantee it. We may take it offline for short maintenance windows, urgent security work, or when our hosting providers are degraded. We'll publish planned maintenance to your account email when we can. Support is by email; we don't offer telephone support.

11. Beta and friend-trial use

Until ClearHold opens to public sign-ups, the Service operates as a closed friend-trial. Features may be incomplete, and outputs (including any draft IR3R pack) are intended to be reviewed and adjusted by your accountant before filing. Friend-trial participants are encouraged to flag anomalies via email so we can fix them before public launch.

12. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms from time to time. Material changes will be notified by email to your account address at least 14 days before they take effect. Continued use of the Service after the effective date means you accept the updated terms. The effective date at the top of this page tells you which version applies.

13. Who we are

The Service is operated by ClearHold Limited, 173A St Heliers Bay Road, St Heliers, Auckland 1071, New Zealand. You can reach us at hello@clearhold.nz for general enquiries, support@clearhold.nz for support, and security@clearhold.nz for security.