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 cited property work from them. They solve different problems, and most agencies eventually need both.
| 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 jobs. | 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. Ask plain-English questions across every property in the portfolio with citations to the source page. | Proppi |
| Healthy Homes / minimum standards evidence | 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 evidence 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 evidence as structured fields. | Bright-line start dates, end dates, main-home evidence, cost-base components, and IR833 evidence 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: deductions evidence, 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 evidence trails kept separate but searchable side-by-side. | 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 document-reading layer. The same property might appear in both systems — the PMS owns the operational record, Proppi owns the document evidence trail. When the owner calls asking "what date does that clause about pets actually say?", Proppi prepares the answer 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 job.
- Your owners ask for income/expense reports, not Healthy Homes or Australian Taxation Office evidence trails.
- 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 evidence, 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 evidence trails kept separate.
For agencies
Free trial on Team workspaces
Proppi's Team plan includes five Professional seats sharing one workspace, with extra seats at $29/month each. Pair it with whichever PMS you already run — see the property managers overview for how that handover works in practice.
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