PropertyDesk is a property management platform with built-in accounting, made for UAE rental offices. It holds your owners, buildings, units, tenants, contracts and rent cheques in one connected system — and because those records are linked, it can chase the dates for you, calculate what has been collected, and produce owner statements without anyone re-typing a figure.

The short version: your whole rental office in one system — properties, cheques, commissions, VAT invoices and the accounting behind them — in English and Arabic.

It is built for the way rental offices in the UAE actually work — post-dated cheques, annual tenancy contracts, owner statements and VAT. It fits:

• Property management companies
• Real estate and leasing offices
• Landlords managing several buildings themselves
• Administrative and accounting teams inside either

The offices that get the most from it are the ones currently running on a stack of spreadsheets and a shared inbox — because that's the thing it replaces.

Six core record types, connected in one chain:

• Owners — contact details, ID and licence, bank details for payouts
• Buildings — location, emirate, title deed, plot number
• Units — type, floor, size, and a status that keeps itself current
• Tenants — individuals or companies, with documents attached
• Contracts — dates, rent, cheque count, deposit, agent and commission
• Cheques — every rent payment expected and received

Alongside them: payments and receipts, agents and staff with their commission percentages, and a set of optional add-ons covering accounting, VAT invoicing, maintenance, legal cases, an owner portal and manager approvals.

An office can be live in a week. The work isn't learning the system — it's getting your existing portfolio in. Add records in the order the chain runs (owner → building → unit → tenant → contract → cheques) and each step is quicker than the one before, because the fields you need are already there to pick from.

If you have more than a handful of buildings, import from a file instead — see the next question.

Yes. There is a bulk import for each of the six record types. You import in the same order as the chain — owners first, then buildings, units, tenants, contracts and finally cheques — so that each import can find the records it needs to link to.

Everything you need to act on their behalf: name, phone and email; Emirates ID or passport; trade licence number and licensing authority for corporate owners; bank name and IBAN for payouts; attached document copies; and free-text notes.

Their record also carries a portfolio view — every building and unit they own, every live contract, and the money behind it all.

Open the owner from the Owners list. Their page has tabs covering their buildings, units, contracts and cheques — plus a financial summary showing what has been collected and what is still outstanding across the whole portfolio.

It exports to PDF, which makes it the page to open before an owner meeting and the document to leave behind afterwards.

A single view of how their investment is performing:

• Total units, and how many are rented versus vacant
• Units currently under maintenance
• Live contracts and the annual rent they represent
• Rent collected, rent in hand but not yet cleared, and rent outstanding
• Occupancy across their properties

Owners can also be given secure access to see this themselves — see the owner portal under Add-ons.

Anything you let: an apartment, an office, a shop, a warehouse or a villa. Each unit belongs to one building and one owner, and carries its type (studio through five-bedroom, villa or shop), floor, size in square feet, and its own status.

The status moves with your contracts, so a unit doesn't sit marked as rented after its lease ends.

Live contracts divided by total units, as a percentage. Eighteen live contracts across twenty-five units is 72% occupancy. It updates the moment a contract starts or ends — there is nothing to recalculate.

The record of the agreement between owner and tenant. It holds the contract number, the unit and the tenant, start and end dates, the annual rent, the number of cheques, the security deposit, and the leasing agent with their commission percentage.

From that one record the system generates the payment schedule, tracks expiry, feeds occupancy and income figures, and prints the official contract form.

Over time, yes — and it should. A unit accumulates a full leasing history: who rented it, at what rent, for how long. Only one contract is live at any moment, which is what keeps occupancy honest.

Never delete an old contract at renewal. It is the evidence of what was agreed and paid, and it carries that tenant's cheque history with it.

Yes — and this is the part that surprises people. Enter the start date, the annual rent and the number of cheques, and the full schedule appears immediately: the rent split into equal whole-dirham amounts, with due dates spread evenly across the lease term.

Any rounding remainder is absorbed by the final cheque, so the total always matches the annual rent to the fils. You fill in only what the system can't know — the cheque number and the bank on each row. Save the contract and every cheque becomes its own record, already linked and already due-dated.

Create a new contract with the new dates and rent, and let the old one expire. Do not edit the old contract in place — you would be overwriting last year's history, including the cheques attached to it.

The new contract generates its own cheque schedule, so a renewal takes about as long as it takes to agree the rent.

Yes. Contracts ending within seven days appear in your notification bell, and a notice goes to both the owner and the tenant automatically — enough time to agree a renewal or arrange the handover.

Once the end date passes, the contract is marked expired on its own and the unit returns to your vacancy list.

Yes. From a contract record you can produce the official tenancy contract form with everything already filled in — owner and tenant details, licence numbers, the unit, building, plot, title deed and utility premises number, the rent, the term and the cheque details.

It is worth entering the licence, title deed and premises numbers once on the owner, building and unit records, because that is where the form pulls them from every time afterwards.

Through cheques attached to the tenancy contract. Each one carries its cheque number, bank, amount, due date, purpose and status. That is the whole model — because it is how rent actually moves in the UAE.

Money arriving outside the cheque cycle — a cash settlement, a transfer — is recorded as a payment or receipt against the same contract.

Eight, because a cheque's life has more than five outcomes:

The last column is the one that matters. Your collection rate is a ratio of money, not a count of cheques, and these statuses decide what sits in the denominator.

You change one status; the system does the rest.

• An alert goes to the owner and the tenant immediately — no email to write
• The cheque appears in your notification bell, in red, at the top
• It stays there for 30 days, so it cannot quietly drop off the list
• The amount leaves your collected figure and the dashboard reflects it at once

When the tenant provides a replacement, mark the original as replaced and add the new cheque as its own record against the same contract. The history then shows exactly what happened — which matters if the matter ever goes further.

Rent money actually collected in the period, divided by rent money due in that period. Three rules keep it meaningful:

• Only cheques with a purpose of rent count — a security deposit in the drawer never distorts it
• Only cheques on live contracts count
• Cheques that left the cycle — replaced, returned to tenant, or given to the owner — leave the denominator too

It appears on your dashboard with a pace indicator, so you can see whether you are ahead of or behind where the month should be.

That's a supported arrangement, set on the contract. Each contract is either office collects — cheques come to you and are banked through your account — or owner collects directly, where cheques are passed straight to the owner.

On owner-collected contracts you are recording custody, not receipts. Those cheques are marked given to owner and never appear as money your office collected, so your own figures stay clean while the owner still gets a full record.

Yes. Every cheque carries a purpose: rent, security deposit, damages, commission, service charge, key handover, or other. They are all tracked and alerted on the same way — but only rent cheques feed the collection rate and rent-due figures.

Nine, sent in your office's name without anyone writing them:

A single additional switch copies every one of them to your office managers, so someone senior always sees what went out.

Four causes, in the order they're usually the answer:

• No email address on the record. This is it roughly four times out of five. The field isn't marked as required, but nothing reaches anyone without it.
• That notification is switched off. Each one is an individual switch in Settings, and they all start off.
• The trigger didn't match. The due-tomorrow notice only goes to cheques still marked received — a cheque already deposited won't produce one.
• It's in their junk folder. A first message from a new sender often lands there.

Every notification is its own switch, and they all start off. Turn on only what your office wants clients to receive — some offices want tenants reminded of every cheque, others only want the bounce alert. Both are one click.

You can change your mind at any time, and it takes effect on the next send.

The live count in your header, on every page. Click it anywhere and you see what's behind it, grouped by urgency, with every line linking straight to the record:

• Bounced — cheques bounced in the last 30 days
• Due today — held cheques to bank today
• Due tomorrow — one day's warning
• Expiring — live contracts ending within 7 days

Thirty seconds each morning, and you have seen everything that needs you today.

Yes — real double-entry accounting, inside the same system rather than beside it. That is the distinction that matters: your rent, commissions, repairs and invoices post to the books from the operational records you were already keeping.

It includes a full chart of accounts, journal entries with review before posting, period locks so a closed month stays closed, an audit trail of every action, and reversal rather than deletion — so the books stay defensible.

Yes. It produces UAE tax invoices carrying your company details and TRN, as A4 PDFs, emailed to the client from inside the system. Seven invoice types are supported, VAT is calculated on the applicable ones, and a VAT report summarises output and input tax for the return.

It also covers what real invoicing needs beyond issuing: partial and split payments, payment reversal, credit notes with their own numbering, recurring invoice schedules, a receivables ageing report and a statement of account.

No — and that is the whole reason the accounting is built in rather than bolted on. A contract creates its cheque schedule; a cleared cheque posts to the books; a repair recharged to a tenant raises the invoice and the receivable together; a commission follows its contract.

What you type is the operational fact — the cheque cleared, the job is done. The accounting consequence follows from it.

• Trial balance, profit & loss, and balance sheet
• VAT report for the return period
• Receivables ageing — what is overdue, and by how long
• Tenant ledger — every charge and payment for one tenant
• Owner statement and owner ledger
• Commissions, with direct bookings separated out

Every one of them exports to spreadsheet and to PDF.

A clear view of rent activity for a month: total rent due, how much was collected, what is still outstanding, and the detail behind each figure cheque by cheque.

Four month views answer four different questions — last month (what actually happened), this month (what's live now), this month's plan (what should happen), and next month (what's coming). Together they mean nothing about a month is a surprise on the 28th.

Yes, two ways, from every list page and every report. Spreadsheet when someone needs to work with the numbers; PDF when someone needs to read them. PDFs come out branded and print-ready, so an owner statement can go straight into an email or an envelope.

On the first of each month, every owner with an email address on file receives their portfolio statement for the month just ended — properties, contracts, cheque activity and the money behind it — without anyone assembling it.

Like the other notifications, it is a switch you control.

Because the conversation you have with an owner is only as good as the figure you bring to it. Reports here let you track income accurately, see unpaid rent before the owner does, compare how one building performs against another, and show your working — which is what keeps a management contract renewed.

Seven, each switched on individually so your system stays the size of your work: accounting, VAT invoicing, maintenance, legal cases, an owner portal, manager approvals, and a financial summary that appears inside every building, unit, tenant, owner and contract report.

If a section isn't in your menu, it simply hasn't been turned on. Switch one off later and its menu entries disappear cleanly — your data stays exactly where it was.

Yes, through the owner portal. They sign in with a link emailed to them — no password to set, forget or reset — and see only their own properties, leases, statements, repairs, cases and invoices.

It is read-only: an owner can see everything about their portfolio and change nothing in it. Access is granted by your office, and can be revoked at any time.

Yes — repair tickets from first report to resolved, with photos, a contractor directory with scorecards, response-time targets you set yourself, and recurring preventive schedules for the jobs that come round every quarter.

The costs connect to the rest of the system: a repair can be billed to the owner, the tenant, split between them, or absorbed by the office, and a recharge raises a proper tax invoice. One screen shows exactly what you still owe contractors for finished work.

It tracks them. Cases, hearings, lawyer and court fees, and recoveries live in one place instead of scattered across email threads — with fees and recoveries posting to your books automatically and a profit-and-loss view per case and per lawyer.

For the changes that shouldn't happen quietly. Your office manager decides which ones need sign-off — an owner's bank account or IBAN, a rent figure — and when a staff member makes that change it is held rather than saved. The approver sees a clear before-and-after and decides.

Everything else saves normally. Only what you nominate is ever held.

Fully — not as a translation layer added afterwards. The entire interface runs in Arabic with correct right-to-left layout: menus, forms, tables, dashboards and reports. PDF statements and invoices generate in Arabic too, with amounts and reference numbers still reading correctly left-to-right where they should.

It is set per person, not per office, so your accountant can work in Arabic while your leasing agent works in English — same system, same data, at the same time. Switching is one click in the header, and you keep your place.

Access is set by role, so people see the work that belongs to them:

• Office manager — full access, including settings and approvals
• Staff — day-to-day work on properties, contracts and cheques
• Accountant — the financial side, without the rest of the admin
• Maintenance — repair tickets only
• Lawyer — legal cases only
• Owner — their own portfolio only, read-only, through the portal

Your plan includes a set number of units. When you reach it, adding a new unit is blocked with a message explaining why — but everything you already have keeps working normally, and editing existing records is never restricted.

Moving up a plan lifts the limit immediately.

You are warned a week ahead, then again three days before. If the renewal date passes there is a grace period during which managers keep full access and staff move to read-only, so nothing urgent is stranded.

Nothing is ever deleted. Full access returns the moment the subscription is renewed, with your data exactly as you left it.

Yes, at any time. Every list page and every report exports to spreadsheet and to PDF. Your data is yours — the exports are there so that stays true in practice, not just in principle.

Start with the user guide — it covers setup, the working day, the cheque cycle, and a troubleshooting section for the six things that most often look broken but aren't.

If that doesn't answer it, write to support@propertydesk.cloud and a person will reply.