Does Proppi replace a property management system?

No. A property management system runs the trust account, dispatches maintenance, and sends tenant communications. Proppi reads the documents the property management system produces — leases, condition reports, bond records, insurance certificates — and prepares source-linked work with citations. Most agencies use both.

Can Proppi read documents that came out of my PMS?

Yes. Proppi ingests the PDFs, scans, and photos that property managers regularly handle, regardless of which PMS produced them. The output of a typical PMS — leases, condition reports, bond records, statements — is exactly the document set Proppi is built to read.

Does Proppi handle trust accounting?

No. Proppi does not move money, hold trust funds, or generate tenant statements. Trust accounting stays in your property management system. Proppi reads the documents that flow into and out of that system and turns them into property memory for source-linked work.

When does a property manager not need Proppi?

If your PMS already turns documents into reliable source-linked owner and tenant work across every property under management, you may not need a separate property memory layer. In practice most agencies still assemble that work by digging through folders, which is where Proppi helps.

Positioning

Proppi vs a Property Management System

A property management system (PMS) runs the operational machine — trust account, rent ledger, maintenance dispatch, tenant messaging. Proppi reads the property documents that machine produces and prepares source-linked work with citations. They solve different problems, and most agencies eventually need both.

8 workflows comparedFor New Zealand and Australia

Job to be done	Property Management System	Proppi	Pick
Collecting rent and reconciling bond	Yes — built for it. Trust accounting, tenant statements, bond lodgement integrations.	No. Proppi is not a trust account and does not move money.	PMS
Maintenance dispatch and contractor coordination	Yes — work-order workflows, tradie portals, owner approvals.	No. Proppi files the maintenance reports the PMS produces, but does not dispatch work orders.	PMS
Tenant communication trail	Yes — built-in messaging to tenants and owners with templates.	No. Proppi does not send messages.	PMS
Document understanding across every property	Documents live as file attachments on a property record. Search is filename- and folder-based.	Documents are read on upload. Proppi prepares portfolio-wide views and owner-ready work with source links to exact pages.	Proppi
Healthy Homes / minimum standards records	Typically a folder of uploaded PDFs and photos. Most PMS products do not read the contents of the file.	Insulation, heating, ventilation, moisture, and draught-stopping records surfaced from the compliance report itself. Statement-of-intent dates tracked.	Proppi
Bright-line property rule and capital gains tax records	Typically stores purchase contracts and settlement statements as attachments; most products do not extract bright-line dates or cost-base records as structured fields.	Bright-line start dates, end dates, main-home records, cost-base components, and IR833 records pulled out and indexed.	Proppi
Tax-time pack for the accountant	End-of-financial-year income/expense reports.	Source documents the accountant will ask for: deduction records, apportionment records, holiday-home private-use day counts, loan-purpose records.	Both
Cross-jurisdiction (New Zealand + Australia)	Most PMS products are single-market by design; trans-Tasman portfolios often end up split across two subscriptions.	Inland Revenue and Australian Taxation Office source records kept separate side-by-side, so Proppi prepares work for the right jurisdiction.	Proppi

The boundary: who reads the documents?

Most PMS products treat documents as file attachments. The lease is an uploaded PDF on the tenancy record. The Healthy Homes statement is an uploaded PDF on the property record. The PMS typically knows the document exists and can search by filename — but in most products does not read the document. The clauses, dates, dollar amounts, and obligations typically live as ink on paper, not as structured data.

Proppi is the property memory layer. The same property might appear in both systems — the PMS owns the operational record, Proppi owns the document record trail and source-linked work for approval. When the owner calls asking "what date does that clause about pets actually say?", Proppi prepares the owner-ready note with the source page attached without anyone opening the PDF.

Stay with a PMS only

You run a managed-rental agency and operations is the core work.
Your owners ask for income/expense reports, not Healthy Homes or Australian Taxation Office source records.
Document discovery is rare and the team is small enough that filename search is fine.

Add Proppi alongside

You manage compliance-heavy stock — Healthy Homes, minimum standards, smoke alarm records, body corp records.
Your owners include investors who need cost-base, bright-line, or capital gains tax records by property.
Your portfolio spans New Zealand and Australia and you need the jurisdiction record trails kept separate.

For agencies

Free while we build it with you

Proppi is free for early members — one shared workspace for the whole team, every read and write auditable. Pair it with whichever PMS you already run — see theproperty managers overviewfor how that handover works in practice.

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