Comparison
Copied lease data, or a record you can prove.
Most owners we talk to keep their lease truth in a spreadsheet built by one person, alongside whatever their property manager keeps in their own system. Both work until an amendment changes a governing term, a manager changes, or a lender asks where a number came from. This page compares Provenance to those two realities — including the rows where they win.
The category sentence
The spreadsheet
Fast, flexible, and owned by you — until it is copied. A cell carries no source, no state and no history, so nobody downstream can tell a checked number from a guess.
Typical manager-held workflow
Yardi, MRI, AppFolio and their peers run the building and the money well. They assume the lease data going in is already correct, and the working record leaves with the manager.
Provenance
The verified lease record that sits beside them. Every term carries its state, its source page and its full history, and every date is calculated from those terms rather than typed in.
Side by side
Rows where we are behind are marked the same way as rows where we are ahead. The manager column describes the typical owner-facing workflow we encounter, not a feature audit of any one platform — individual systems and configurations vary.
| Capability | Provenance | Spreadsheets & shared drives | Typical manager-held workflow |
|---|---|---|---|
One place the owner controls The register does not live in a vendor's or a manager's account. | Owner organisation is the permanent root; everyone else is a revocable guest | The file is yours, but so is every copy of it that has drifted | The working record sits inside the manager's system and leaves when they do |
Every term shows its source page You can get from a number to the sentence that created it in one click. | Document, page and excerpt stored with the fact | A cell has no memory of where it was copied from | The lease file exists somewhere; the link to the number usually does not |
Verified vs unverified is durable data You can tell at a glance what has been checked by a person and what has not. | Five explicit states: unverified, verified, derived, superseded, stale | A highlighted cell is a convention, not a state | Data is trusted once keyed |
History is append-only Old values are superseded, never overwritten. | Enforced by a database trigger, not by convention | Overwrite, save, and the previous answer is gone | Change logs exist; prior values are rarely queryable as of a past date |
Answers "why this date?" Every deadline traces to the terms and rule that produced it. | Calculators show inputs, rule and source page | A formula, if someone wrote one and nobody pasted over it | Critical dates are typed in by a person |
An amendment re-derives what depends on it A changed term marks everything downstream as stale. | Dependency graph flags stale obligations automatically | Someone has to remember every tab the change touches | Nothing links the amendment to the dates it invalidates |
CAM reconciliation from the same record Pro-rata, caps, base year and exclusions, all from verified terms. | Worksheet refuses to run on unverified inputs | Common, and the most common place errors hide | Strong here — on numbers nobody traced back to the lease |
Lender / auditor packet output A PDF a third party can check line by line. | Every figure carries its citation | You export the numbers and vouch for them yourself | Reports exist; provenance of each number does not |
Revocable outside-party access Brokers and counsel get scoped, expiring access. | Property-scoped guests, 72-hour invites, instant revocation | Emailing a file is permanent access you cannot withdraw | Possible, usually an administrator project |
Portfolio accounting and operations GL, AP/AR, budgeting, maintenance, investor reporting. | Deliberately not built — Provenance sits beside your system, not on top of it | Not what it is for | This is what these systems are for, and they are good at it |
SOC 2 report What an institutional diligence team asks for. | Not yet — readiness work is published on our security page | Not applicable | Established platforms generally have one |
These rows describe the two workflows most owners actually run today, not a test of any named vendor. Dedicated lease platforms — Prophia, Leasecake, Occupier and others — publish their own material on citations, audit trails and amendment handling; read it, and compare it to ours directly. If you believe a row is wrong about how you work, tell us and we will correct it.
Stay where you are if…
- You have a handful of leases that rarely amend and one person who knows them all.
- Nobody downstream asks you to prove where a number came from.
- Your diligence process requires a SOC 2 report today.
- You need portfolio accounting, not a verified record of lease terms.
Choose Provenance if…
- A blown renewal notice or a mis-billed CAM year would genuinely hurt.
- Your lease truth currently lives in a spreadsheet and one person's memory.
- You get asked to prove a number to a lender, an auditor or a buyer.
- You want the record to still be right after the person who built it leaves.
Audit one lease free
Send us a single lease with its amendments. We extract it, verify it, and return a findings report: what is wrong, what it is worth, and the page each conclusion came from. If the report finds nothing, you have a clean lease and it cost you one document.