The Challenge
Property Cafe Real Estate and Blue Moon Properties needed operational software that matched how a South African agency actually runs: owners, units, tenants, leases, trust money and month-end. Off-the-shelf tools Leonie had used could not do banking ports — bank statement intake and bank batch / EFT-style export flows required for real reconciliations and owner payouts. Without that, banking stayed outside the system, trust and rental ops stayed fragmented, and the principal could not run agency and student-accommodation books in one accountable workspace.
Our Solution
African Vanilla designed and built RentFlow: a compliance-first, multi-tenant rental-agency platform (Next.js + Supabase) tailored to South African property practice. RentFlow covers agency CRM (owners, properties, units, tenants, leases), PPRA s54-oriented trust accounting, bank transaction import, reconciliation, month-end owner statements, and bank-batch / bulk EFT CSV export (including FNB / Standard Bank-style batch files), plus SARS and TPN export paths and FICA/POPIA-ready compliance fields. The product lives in the RentFlow codebase and is supported by African Vanilla as the custom-software and IT partner — solving the banking-port gap the previous software could not close.
Agencies do not need another generic CRM. They need software that can touch banking, trust money and month-end the way South African practice actually works.
For Property Cafe Real Estate and Blue Moon Properties, that was the gap. Previous software could run pieces of the portfolio story — but it could not do banking ports. Bank files stayed outside the product; reconciliations and owner payouts stayed manual or bolted on. African Vanilla’s answer was not another spreadsheet: it was RentFlow, a custom platform built for this agency.
What RentFlow is
RentFlow is African Vanilla’s compliance-first rental agency operations product for South Africa — built as a modern multi-tenant workspace (Next.js App Router, Supabase, TypeScript) for agencies that manage owners, property tenants and trust money.
From the live product and engineering spec, the core surface includes:
- Agency CRM — owners, properties, units, tenants, leases and maintenance in one workspace
- Trust accounting — protected-money flows, trust bank accounts, reconciliation and deposit-interest awareness aligned to PPRA s54-style practice
- Banking ports — bank CSV / statement import, bank matching, and bank-batch / bulk EFT CSV export (including FNB / Standard Bank-style batch files) so month-end and owner payouts are not stuck outside the system
- Month-end — owner statement payloads, SARS third-party data export paths, TPN payment-behaviour export readiness
- Compliance posture — FICA CDD fields, POPIA consent/data-subject workflows, and audit-oriented logging designed into the data model
That banking-port capability is the differentiator Leonie’s previous stack lacked — and the reason RentFlow was built.
Why custom software (not another licence)
Off-the-shelf tools fail quietly when the South African trust and banking workflow is an afterthought. RentFlow was scoped so Property Cafe owns an operations backbone that matches the business: agency + student accommodation, trust-aware money movement, and exportable bank batches — with African Vanilla as the partner who can keep shipping features instead of locking the client into a vendor that will not move.
For the Hermes billing automation and voice-to-chat workflow for the same clients, see Hermes billing for Property Cafe Real Estate.
Who this is for
Estate agencies, rental managers and student-accommodation operators who have outgrown tools that cannot import bank activity or generate bank-batch / EFT exports — and who need custom software that respects trust accounting and compliance, not a generic overseas SaaS retrofit.
Need property software that can actually do banking ports? Talk to us about custom software or start with a free consultation.
"The software I had before could not do banking ports. African Vanilla built RentFlow around how we actually work — banking, trust money, owners and tenants in one place. It is the operations backbone Property Cafe and Blue Moon Properties needed."
Key Results
- ✓ Purpose-built RentFlow platform replacing prior software that could not do banking ports
- ✓ Bank CSV import and bank-batch / bulk EFT export paths for real month-end and payout workflows
- ✓ Trust accounting workspace aligned to protected-money / s54-style agency practice
- ✓ Unified CRM for owners, properties, units, tenants and leases across Property Cafe and Blue Moon Properties
- ✓ Month-end statements plus SARS and TPN export readiness in one operations stack
- ✓ Ongoing custom-software partnership so the product evolves with the portfolio — not a dead install
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