Your whole rental office,
in one connected record.
Owners, buildings, units, tenants, contracts and cheques stop living in six different spreadsheets and start living in one chain — where a bounced cheque already knows which tenant, which unit and which owner it belongs to. This guide takes you from an empty system to a running office.
01
Start here — three things, then you're oriented
Most systems ask you to learn a menu. This one asks you to understand three ideas. Everything else follows from them.
Everything hangs off a chain
An owner owns a building. A building holds units. A unit gets a contract. A contract is paid by cheques. Build records in that order and every report fills itself in. Skip a link and the figures go quiet.
The system watches the calendar
You never chase a date again. Cheques due tomorrow, contracts ending in seven days, repairs running late — the alert reaches you and the tenant before it becomes a problem.
Status is the system's language
A cheque's status is not a label — it is what drives your collection rate, your alerts and your owner statements. Keep statuses truthful and every number downstream is right.
The chain, in order
Why the order matters
Each record needs the one before it to exist. You cannot attach a unit to a building that isn't there yet. Ten minutes spent in the right order saves an afternoon of re-linking later.
Your first six records
Add the owner
Name, phone, and — this is the one people skip — the email address. No email means no cheque alerts, no expiry notices, no monthly statement. It is the single most valuable field on the record.
Add the building
Pick its owner, give it a name, emirate and location. Add the title deed and plot number now if you have them — they are what the official contract form pulls from later.
Add the units
Each unit belongs to a building and an owner. Set the unit number, type (studio through villa or shop), floor and size. Status starts as Vacant and moves itself as contracts come and go.
Add the tenant
Individual or company, with Emirates ID or trade licence, phone and email. Attach the ID copy while it's in front of you — you will want it at renewal.
Create the contract
Choose the unit and tenant, set start and end dates, annual rent, and the number of cheques. That last field is what makes the next step almost disappear.
Let the cheque schedule build itself
The moment you set rent and number of cheques, the full payment schedule appears — amounts split evenly, dates spread across the lease. You type only the cheque number and bank for each row. Save the contract and every cheque record is created for you.
Already running an office on spreadsheets?
You don't have to type any of this twice. Use Import Data to bring owners, buildings, units, tenants, contracts and cheques in from a file — in that same order, one type at a time.
02
What a working day actually looks like
Learning a system feature-by-feature is slow. Learning it as a day is fast — because that's the shape your job already has.
First thing
Open the Dashboard and read it once
It greets you by name and answers the only question that matters at 9am: what needs me today. Critical alerts sit at the top and vanish entirely when there's nothing wrong. Below them: collection rate for the month, cheques due today, bounced cheques, occupancy. Then the two lists that run your morning — Action Required Today and The Next 7 Days.
Through the day
Update status as things actually happen
Cheque handed to the bank? Mark it deposited. Bank confirmed? Mark it cleared. Repair finished? Close the ticket. Each change is two clicks, and each one keeps the dashboard honest for everyone else looking at it.
When something goes wrong
Change one status, and the follow-up happens
Set a cheque to bounced and the alert reaches the owner and the tenant immediately — no email to compose, no phone call to remember. The cheque then sits in your notification bell until it's resolved.
Before a client meeting
Open the owner's page and read the summary
Their buildings, units, live contracts, cheque history, what has been collected and what is outstanding — one page, ready to talk from. Export it to PDF and it's a leave-behind.
Month end
Close the month out, then look forward
The month overview pages show what was collected against what was due, what slipped, and what is coming. On the first of the month, every owner with an email on file receives their statement automatically.
03
The six records, and what each one is for
Every list page works the same way: search, filter, open, export. Learn one and you have learned all six.
👤Owners
The people you answer to. Contact details, ID and licence, bank name and IBAN for payouts, and a portfolio page showing everything they own with the money behind it. They can also be given their own secure view — see Add-ons.
🏢Buildings
Groups your units and carries the details the official contract form needs: emirate, location, title deed, plot number. Each building has its own report page with occupancy and income across all its units.
🚪Units
The thing you actually let. Type, floor, size in square feet, and a status that keeps itself current — vacant, rented, or under maintenance. Occupancy across your whole portfolio is calculated from these.
👥Tenants
Individuals or companies, with the documents attached. Their page shows every contract they have held with you and every cheque they have paid — the full history in one place at renewal time.
📄Contracts
The agreement itself: dates, annual rent, cheque count, security deposit, agent and commission. It generates the payment schedule, drives expiry alerts, and prints as an official contract form already filled in.
🧾Cheques
Every payment expected and received, tied to its contract. Cheque number, bank, amount, due date, purpose and status. This is where your collection rate comes from — the next two sections cover it in detail.
Two more you'll meet
Payments & receipts record money that arrives outside the cheque cycle. Agents and staff carry commission percentages, which feed the commissions report.
04
Contracts, rent schedules and renewals
A UAE tenancy is usually one year, paid in a fixed number of cheques. The contract form is built around exactly that, so the part that used to take twenty minutes now takes one.
The payment schedule builds itself
Enter the start date, the annual rent and the number of cheques, and the schedule appears on the spot: the rent split into equal whole-dirham amounts, dates spread evenly across the lease term, with any rounding remainder absorbed by the final cheque so the total always matches the rent exactly.
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, already due-dated, already feeding your dashboard.
Change the rent, change the schedule
Adjust the rent or the cheque count before saving and the rows recalculate. Once the contract is saved, the cheques exist as records of their own and are edited individually — which is what you want, because reality rarely matches the plan perfectly.
Contract statuses
| Status | What it means | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| Draft | Being prepared, not signed | Excluded from occupancy and income figures |
| Active | Running now | Counts as occupied; drives income and expiry alerts |
| Expired | Past its end date | Set automatically once the end date passes; the unit frees up |
| Cancelled | Ended early | Kept for history; no longer counted anywhere |
Renewing
Create a new contract with the new dates and rent. Do not overwrite the old one. The previous contract is the evidence of what was agreed and paid last year — it is what makes a tenant's history worth having.
When a tenant leaves
Set the contract to cancelled if they leave early, or simply let it expire on its end date. Either way the unit returns to vacant and shows up in the vacancy list on your dashboard.
Seven days before every expiry
An alert reaches the owner and the tenant automatically — enough notice to agree a renewal or arrange a handover. It only sends if both records have an email address saved, and if the notice is switched on in settings.
Printing the official contract
From a contract record you can produce the official tenancy contract form with the owner, tenant, unit, building, rent and cheque details already filled in — including the licence, title deed, plot and utility premises numbers, which is why it's worth entering them once on the building and owner records.
05
Cheques & payments — the part that pays for itself
This is where most offices lose money and time. Post-dated cheques sit in a drawer for a year, and the drawer doesn't send reminders. Here, every cheque has a due date the system is watching.
The eight statuses
| Status | What it means | Your next move | Counted as collected? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Received | In your hands, not yet banked | Deposit on or before the due date | Not yet — it's expected |
| Deposited | Handed to the bank | Wait for clearance, then update | Not yet — in transit |
| Cleared | Money received | Nothing. Done. | Yes |
| Bounced | Returned by the bank | Contact the tenant, arrange a replacement | No |
| Replaced | Superseded by a new cheque | Add the replacement as its own record | No — the replacement carries the amount |
| On hold | Held back at the tenant's request | Agree a date and bank it | Still expected, still counted in the total |
| Returned to tenant | Physically handed back | Nothing — it's out of the cycle | No — removed from the total |
| Given to owner | Passed straight to the owner, never banked by you | Nothing — you were the custodian | No — you never collected it |
Why that last column matters
Your collection rate is not a count of cheques — it is a ratio of money. A cheque marked returned to tenant leaves the denominator; a cheque on hold stays in it. That distinction is the difference between a collection rate you can act on and one you quietly stop trusting.
What a cheque is for
Every cheque carries a purpose: rent, security deposit, damages, commission, service charge, key handover, or other. Only rent cheques count toward your collection rate and rent-due figures — so a security deposit sitting in the drawer never distorts the number you report to an owner.
Who banks the cheque
Each contract is set to one of two collection modes, and it changes what the system expects to see:
🏦Office collects
Cheques come to you, you bank them, and the money is tracked through your books before being paid out to the owner. This is the default and the usual arrangement.
🤝Owner collects directly
Cheques go straight to the owner's account. You are recording custody, not receipts — so those cheques are marked given to owner and never appear as money you collected.
Handling a bounce, step by step
Set the status to bounced
Open the cheque — from the cheques list, from the dashboard, or straight from the notification bell — and change its status. The alert to the owner and the tenant goes out immediately.
Agree a replacement with the tenant
The bounced cheque stays visible in your notification bell for 30 days, so it cannot quietly drop off your list while you're waiting for a call back.
Record the replacement
Mark the original as replaced, then add the new cheque as its own record against the same contract, with its own number, bank and due date. The history now shows exactly what happened — which matters if the matter ever goes further.
06
Alerts, the bell, and nine automatic emails
Two systems, two jobs. The bell tells you what needs attention. The emails tell your owners and tenants, so you don't have to.
The notification bell
Always in the header, on every page
The number is live. Click it anywhere in the system to see what's behind it, grouped by urgency, with every line a link straight to the record.
| Alert | What triggers it | Why it's there |
|---|---|---|
| Bounced | A cheque bounced in the last 30 days | Highest urgency — money already missed |
| Due today | A held cheque is due today | Bank it today |
| Due tomorrow | A held cheque is due tomorrow | One day's warning to prepare |
| Expiring | An active contract ends within 7 days | Time to renew or arrange handover |
The nine automatic emails
These go out on your behalf, in your office's name, without anyone writing them.
| What happened | Owner | Tenant | When it sends |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cheque due tomorrow | ✓ | ✓ | Each morning |
| Contract expiring in 7 days | ✓ | ✓ | Each morning |
| Cheque bounced | ✓ | ✓ | The moment you change the status |
| Cheque cleared | ✓ | ✓ | The moment you change the status |
| Monthly portfolio statement | ✓ | — | 1st of each month |
Every one of these is a switch — and they start switched off
Go to Settings to turn on the ones your office wants. This is deliberate: on day one you are importing historical data, and nobody wants a year of old cheques emailing your clients. Turn them on once your data is in.
Want a copy of everything?
There is a single switch that copies every notification to your office managers, so someone senior always sees what went out.
No email address, no email
This is the most common reason a client says they never heard from you. The email field on an owner or tenant record isn't marked as required, but nothing reaches them without it.
07
Reports, portfolios and exports
You don't build reports here. Every record already has one, because the chain means the system knows how everything connects.
Every record has a report page
👤Owner portfolio
Every building and unit they own, live contracts, cheque history, what has been collected and what is outstanding. The page to open before any owner meeting.
🏢Building report
Occupancy across the building, the units inside it, the contracts running, and the income behind them. Useful for spotting a floor that isn't performing.
🚪Unit report
The full life of one unit: who has rented it, at what rent, what was collected, what it cost to maintain. This is what tells you whether a rent is right.
👥Tenant report
Every contract and every cheque for one tenant, including bounces. Read it before agreeing a renewal.
Month by month
Four dedicated views answer four different questions: last month (what actually happened and what slipped), this month (what's live right now), this month's plan (what should happen), and next month (what's coming, so nothing surprises you).
Commissions
Agent and staff commissions calculated from the percentage on each contract, with direct bookings separated out so your own deals don't inflate anyone's number.
Taking it out of the system
Every list page and every report exports two ways: a spreadsheet file when someone needs to work with the numbers, and a PDF when someone needs to read them. PDFs come out branded and print-ready, so an owner statement can go straight to an envelope or an email.
08
Add-ons — the parts you switch on when you need them
A two-person office and a fifty-building office need different systems. These are switched on individually, so yours stays the size of your work. If a section below isn't in your menu, it simply hasn't been turned on.
📊Accounting
Proper double-entry books built into the same system — journals, trial balance, profit and loss, balance sheet, VAT return, receivables ageing, tenant ledgers and owner statements. Rent, commissions and repairs post themselves; you don't type anything twice.
🧾VAT invoicing
UAE tax invoices with your TRN, produced as PDFs and emailed to the client from inside the system. Recurring schedules, partial and split payments, credit notes, an ageing report and a statement of account.
🔧Maintenance
Repair tickets from report to resolved, with photos, a contractor directory with scorecards, response-time targets you set yourself, recurring preventive schedules, and a screen showing exactly what you still owe contractors.
⚖️Legal cases
Cases, hearings, lawyer and court fees, and recoveries — tracked in one place instead of across email threads. Fees and recoveries post to your books automatically, with a profit-and-loss view per case and per lawyer.
🔐Owner portal
Your owners sign in with a link emailed to them — no password to forget — and see only their own portfolio: properties, leases, statements, repairs, cases and invoices. Read-only, and strictly walled off from every other owner's data.
✅Approvals
Decide which changes need a manager's sign-off — a bank account, an IBAN, a rent figure. Staff make the change, it is held rather than saved, and the approver sees a clear before-and-after before deciding.
💹Financial summary
A financial section that appears inside the report page of every building, unit, tenant, owner and contract: collected, in hand but not cleared, outstanding, expected rent, maintenance cost and occupancy — with period comparison, narrowing from an owner down to a single building or unit, and a data-health page that names any record whose figures don't add up.
How to turn one on
Add-ons are enabled from Settings by an office manager. Switch one off and its menu entries disappear cleanly — nothing breaks, and your data stays exactly where it was.
09
Working in Arabic
Not a translation layer bolted on afterwards. The whole system runs in Arabic, right-to-left, including the documents you hand to clients.
🌐Switch any time
Use the language switcher in the header. The interface flips to right-to-left — menus, tables, forms, dashboards and reports — and your place in the system is kept.
📄Documents follow
PDF statements, invoices and reports generate in Arabic with correct right-to-left layout, while amounts and reference numbers stay readable left-to-right where they should.
👥Per person, not per office
Your accountant can work in Arabic while your leasing agent works in English, in the same system, on the same data, at the same time.
✍️Names stay as you typed them
Owner names, building names and notes are your data, not interface text — they appear exactly as entered, in whichever language you entered them.
10
When something doesn't happen
Nearly every "it isn't working" turns out to be one of these six. Check in this order and you'll almost always find it in under a minute.
A client says they never received the email
- Is there an email address on their record? Open the owner or tenant and look. This is the cause about four times out of five.
- Is that notification switched on? Open Settings and check the specific one — they are individual switches and all start off.
- Did the trigger actually match? The due-tomorrow notice only goes to cheques still marked received. A cheque already deposited won't generate one.
- Ask them to check junk mail. A first message from a new sender often lands there.
A cheque isn't showing in my collection figures
- Is it linked to a contract? A cheque with no contract belongs to no owner, no unit and no report. It is invisible everywhere.
- Is its purpose set to rent? Deposits, commissions and service charges are deliberately excluded from rent collection figures.
- Is the contract active? Cheques on draft or cancelled contracts are excluded on purpose.
- Check the status. Returned to tenant, replaced and given to owner all leave the collection total by design.
I can't add a new unit
Your plan includes a set number of units, and you've reached it. The save button is disabled and a message explains why. Existing units keep working normally — editing is never blocked. Contact us to move up a plan.
A contract still shows as active after its end date
Contracts are expired automatically once the end date passes, but the check runs on a daily cycle rather than at midnight on the dot. If it still looks wrong the next day, open the contract and check the end date itself — a typo in the year is the usual culprit.
My change was saved but the record now looks locked
Your office has approvals switched on for that kind of change. It has been captured and sent for sign-off rather than applied, and the record is held until an approver decides. Once approved, your change applies exactly as you made it.
Everything has gone read-only, or I see a renewal notice
Your subscription is near or past its renewal date. You'll see a warning a week ahead, then a grace period where managers keep full access and staff move to read-only. Nothing is ever deleted — access returns the moment the subscription is renewed.
11
Seven habits that keep the data worth trusting
A system is only as good as what goes into it. These seven take almost no time and are the difference between figures you act on and figures you second-guess.
✓
Fill in every email address
It is the switch that turns the whole automatic side of the system on for that person.
✓
Update status the same day
A cheque marked cleared next week means a dashboard that was wrong all week.
✓
Read the bell every morning
Thirty seconds, and you've seen everything that needs you today.
✓
Never delete an old contract
It is the tenant's payment history. Expire it or cancel it — but keep it.
✓
Always link the cheque to its contract
An unlinked cheque exists but counts nowhere. It is the single most damaging gap.
✓
Number contracts consistently
C-1001, C-1002. Dull, and it makes every search and cross-reference instant.
✓
Attach documents while they're in front of you
The ID copy you skip today is the phone call you make at renewal.
Still have a question?
Our FAQs answer the questions offices ask most — or write to us and a person will reply.