BlogAutomation
How Australian Property Managers Can Automate Xero Admin (2026)
Australian property managers deal with a constant stream of financial documents: rent invoices, contractor bills, maintenance quotes, and owner disbursement statements. Xero handles the accounting. eggz sits between your email inbox and Xero, capturing documents automatically so they stop piling up as manual data entry tasks. For a typical property management office, this means hours back per week.
The property management document problem
Property management generates more financial paperwork per transaction than almost any other service business. A single maintenance job might involve an initial quote from a contractor, approval by the owner, a purchase order, a completion invoice, and a GST credit on the owner statement. Multiply that across 50 properties, 10 contractors, and a month's worth of work, and manual processing becomes a real cost.
Most property managers still handle this through a combination of:
- Downloading PDF attachments from email
- Uploading them to Xero or MYOB manually
- Coding each transaction by hand
- Chasing contractors for missing invoices
The tools exist to automate most of this. The problem is that property management software — PropertyMe, REST, Palace, Console — focuses on tenancy, maintenance, and trust accounting, not on the connection between your email inbox and Xero. That gap is where eggz sits.
What can be automated
The documents that flow through a property management business by email are well-suited to automation:
Contractor invoices: When a plumber, electrician, or cleaning company sends an invoice by email, eggz reads the document, extracts the vendor, amount, and line items, and creates a draft bill in Xero. You review and approve. No re-keying.
Maintenance quotes: When a contractor quotes a job before doing it, that quote can be captured in eggz and converted to a purchase order or Xero bill when approved.
Rental invoices: Outbound invoices to tenants — for rent, water charges, or repair contributions — can be created in eggz and synced to Xero automatically.
Trust accounting reconciliation: While trust accounting itself stays in your property management software, the supplier bills that flow through trust can be captured and coded via eggz before reconciliation.
Xero for property management: what works well
Xero is not purpose-built for trust accounting. You'll still need your property management software (PropertyMe, REST, Palace, or Console) to manage tenancies, disbursements, and trust ledgers. But Xero handles the general accounting that sits alongside trust: your business operating account, GST, payroll, BAS, and supplier expenses.
The connection between the two usually involves:
- Exporting transactions from your property management software
- Importing them into Xero (or reconciling against bank feeds)
- Separately managing supplier bills in Xero for work charged to the business rather than through trust
This is where automation helps most. Supplier bills — the business's own costs for maintenance coordination, software, marketing, office expenses — flow through email and can be captured by eggz before they reach Xero.
Property management tools that work with Xero
| Tool | Purpose | Xero integration |
|---|---|---|
| eggz | Email-to-Xero automation (bills, quotes, invoices) | Native (OAuth) |
| PropertyMe | Trust accounting, tenancy management | Xero data export |
| REST Professional | Trust accounting, property management | Xero integration |
| Palace | Property management, trust accounting | Xero integration |
| Dext | Receipt and expense capture | Native (OAuth) |
| Chaser | Debtor management and invoice reminders | Native (OAuth) |
eggz is the only tool in this list focused specifically on email-to-Xero automation. The property management platforms handle trust and tenancy. Dext handles physical receipts and expenses. eggz handles the stream of financial documents arriving by email.
Three statistics worth knowing
Property and real estate services is one of the top five industries by number of small businesses in Australia, with over 50,000 businesses operating in residential property management alone (ABS Business Counts, 2024).
Xero's research found that Australian small business owners — including those in professional services like property management — spend an average of six hours per week on financial admin, with manual data entry from email attachments as a significant contributor (Xero Small Business Insights, 2025).
The Australian Taxation Office processes over 20 million BAS lodgements annually, with GST accuracy on contractor payments a common audit focus for property management businesses (ATO, 2025).
How to set up eggz for a property management business
Step 1: Connect Xero Go to app.eggz.ai and connect your Xero organisation via OAuth. eggz needs permission to create bills, invoices, and contacts in Xero.
Step 2: Connect your email Connect Gmail or Missive — whichever inbox your contractor communications come through. Most property management businesses receive contractor invoices to a shared inbox (accounts@ or admin@). eggz monitors that inbox for incoming financial documents.
Step 3: Build a supplier list Add your regular contractors to eggz as known suppliers. When invoices arrive from known senders, eggz creates bills automatically in Xero with the correct coding. New suppliers get flagged for review.
Step 4: Set up GST rules eggz applies Australian GST handling automatically. For property management, this means contractor invoices are processed with the correct 10% GST coding matching your Xero accounts.
Step 5: Review the queue daily Rather than processing email by email, you review and approve documents from the eggz queue in a single session. Most users find this takes 5-10 minutes a day compared to 30-60 minutes of manual entry.
Frequently asked questions
Does eggz integrate with PropertyMe or REST? Not directly. eggz connects your email inbox to Xero. PropertyMe and REST have their own Xero integrations for trust accounting data. eggz handles the supplier bills and business expenses that flow through your email inbox, which complements rather than overlaps with your property management software.
Can I use eggz to send rent invoices to tenants? Yes. You can create outbound invoices in eggz for rent charges or other tenant billings, which sync to Xero. Most property managers run rent billing through their property management software, but for direct tenancies or non-trust billing, eggz handles outbound invoices.
Does eggz handle GST for property management? Yes. eggz is built for Australian Xero accounts and applies GST automatically to bills and invoices. For property management, the typical coding is contractor invoices with 10% GST credited to the appropriate Xero account.
What if my contractors send paper invoices by mail? eggz handles email-based documents. For paper invoices that arrive by post, you'd need a scanning workflow — photograph or scan the document and email it to your eggz processing address, or use a tool like Dext's mobile app for physical receipt capture.
Can my bookkeeper access eggz? Yes. You can add your bookkeeper as a user in eggz, or they can work directly in Xero reviewing and approving the draft bills eggz creates. Most property management businesses with bookkeepers find that eggz reduces the back-and-forth of forwarding documents to them manually.
Does eggz work with Missive for team inboxes? Yes. eggz is the only Xero add-on with a native Missive integration. If your accounts inbox runs through Missive, eggz connects directly without needing to forward emails to a separate processing address.
How does this work with trust accounting? Trust accounting stays in your property management software (PropertyMe, REST, etc.). eggz handles the business operating expenses and supplier bills in Xero — maintenance costs charged to the agency, office expenses, marketing — rather than the trust ledger itself.
Is eggz priced for small property management agencies? Yes. eggz starts at around $29 AUD per month with founding member pricing, which is lower than most property management software add-ons. A single hour of recovered bookkeeping time more than covers the monthly cost.
Start free with eggz — connect Gmail or Missive to Xero and start processing contractor bills automatically. Founding member pricing available for the first 100 customers.