Every property system demos well. They are demonstrated on clean data, by someone who knows where everything is, following a path they have walked a hundred times.
Your portfolio is not clean. It has a unit with two tenants on one lease, a landlord who takes his remittance in two parts, three tenants in arrears since a year nobody wants to discuss, and a water meter shared between four doors. That is what a system has to survive, and the only way to find out is to make it try.
We build one of these, so treat the below as what we would want a prospect to hold us to.
Test it with your own awkward cases
Ask for a trial and load five of your own units, specifically the five that are difficult. Then attempt:
- A part payment. Someone pays less than the bill. Can you see exactly what it settled and what remains, without doing arithmetic yourself?
- A metered utility. Enter two readings and a rate. Does the tenant's bill show the derivation, or just the total?
- A mid-month move-in. Is it pro-rated correctly without manual adjustment?
- A correction. Bill something wrong on purpose, then fix it. Does the original stay visible, or does the system quietly rewrite history?
- A landlord statement. Produce one. Would the landlord understand it without phoning you?
Then ask the awkward questions
"Can I export everything, today, and in what format?" Ask for a sample export during the trial, not a promise about one. Data you cannot get out is data you no longer own.
"What happens if I stop paying?" Read-only access, a grace period, or a locked door with your records behind it? Get the answer in writing.
"Can an entry be edited after the fact?" If yes, the ledger is not evidence of anything. Ask to see what an audit trail looks like on a record that has been corrected.
"Do you hold client money at any point?" If the answer is yes or complicated, understand exactly where it sits and under what licence.
"Who can see what?" Ask to set up a caretaker account and check that it cannot see the ledger. Then ask what happens to that account when the caretaker leaves.
"What is on the roadmap versus what exists?" Say it plainly: which of what I have been shown is live today? A supplier that distinguishes clearly is one you can trust on the rest.
Cost, honestly
Get the whole figure: setup, monthly base, per-unit charges as you grow, and anything billed separately. Then ask what it costs at twice your current size, because the price that matters is the one you will be paying in two years.
The test that beats all of these
Run the new system alongside your existing records for one full month, and compare at the end. Not a feature comparison: the same month, billed both ways.
If the numbers agree, you have found a system that works on your portfolio rather than on a demo. If they don't, you have learned something valuable for the price of a month of double entry, and you have learned it before you migrated three years of history.