Frequently Asked Questions

Oxflare is a property management platform that brings your properties, tenants, rent, payments, maintenance and accounting together in one system, built for landlords and property managers in Kenya.

Oxflare is built for individual landlords, professional property managers, and growing property portfolios, from a single building to a multi property, multi owner operation.

No. Oxflare is designed for everyday use by landlords, property managers and caretakers, not only technical staff. Guidance is provided during onboarding.

Yes. Oxflare is fully responsive and works on phones, tablets and desktop computers, which matters for caretakers and property managers who are often on site rather than at a desk.

Yes. Oxflare is designed to support customer specific M-Pesa payment configurations so payments can be matched to tenants and reconciled against invoices. Available capabilities depend on your setup and provider integration.

Tenants can approve an M-Pesa prompt from their portal, or pay to your paybill using their tenant account number. Cash, cheque and bank transfers can be recorded by your team. Every payment produces a receipt and updates the balance straight away.

Yours. Each organization connects its own paybill or till, so rent goes straight to your account. Oxflare records and reconciles payments but never holds tenant money. See M-Pesa Centre.

The payment is kept as Unallocated, never lost. Your staff match it to the right tenant on the Payments page, and the match is recorded in the audit log.

The extra amount becomes tenant credit and is applied automatically to the next bill. The tenant can see their credit on their statement.

Yes. Choose a fixed amount or a percentage of the unpaid balance, set a grace period, and Oxflare adds the fee once per overdue bill. If you waive a fee, it is never charged again.

Payments are never deleted. A wrong payment is reversed with a reason, which keeps the original entry visible and keeps your history honest.

Yes, as an opt-in module for organizations that need it. Invoices, credit notes and cancellations are queued and sent safely to KRA, and the invoice PDF shows the KRA details once accepted. See KRA eTIMS.

Yes. Oxflare is built to scale from one property to a full portfolio across multiple buildings, owners and locations.

Yes. Caretakers capture meter readings with a photo, Oxflare checks them against the previous reading, calculates the charge and bills the tenant. You can also import readings in bulk. See Utilities & Meters.

Every deposit movement is a ledger row: collected, applied to unpaid bills, deducted for damages, refunded. The amount held is always the sum of the rows. See Leases & Deposits.

Yes. Schedule a new rent from a future date, with an optional new lease end date. The tenant is notified straight away and the change is applied on its date without altering earlier bills.

Yes. Record each owner's management agreement (percentage of rent collected, percentage of rent billed, a fixed fee, or none) and Oxflare builds a monthly owner statement with collections, commission, expenses and net payout. See Owner Statements.

Yes, through your own SMS account. Africa's Talking, Twilio and TextSMS are supported, plus a generic option for other HTTPS bulk-SMS providers. Messages are queued and retried automatically, and a Message Log shows what happened to each one.

Collection rate, billed and collected income, occupancy, net operating income, arrears aging, per-property performance, deposits, expenses, owner statements and a rental income tax report, with Excel or CSV export. See Analytics.

Yes. Tenants log requests and complaints from their portal, your team assigns and updates them, and the tenant can follow progress. Completed jobs can feed straight into expenses.

Yes. Each property can carry house rules that tenants see with their lease, and caretakers can post announcements and send bulk SMS.

Yes. API and webhook access is a plan feature, with scoped keys, idempotent writes and signed webhooks. See Developers.

Yes. Tenants can view their balance, payment history, invoices and receipts, and report maintenance issues through the tenant portal, without calling the property manager for every question.

Yes. Owners can see occupancy, rent collected, outstanding balances and net income for the properties they own, without relying on spreadsheets from a property manager.

Yes. Someone who is both a caretaker and a tenant, for example, signs in once and switches between roles with the account switcher.

No. Owners see occupancy, what tenants owe and monthly collections, but not tenants' phone numbers or ID numbers, and never draft statements.

No installation is needed. Oxflare works in the browser on any phone, tablet or computer.

Setup time depends on the size of your portfolio. Most landlords with a single property can be set up within a few days. Larger portfolios with multiple owners typically go through a short onboarding process to bring in existing tenants and balances accurately.

You can book a demo or tell us about your portfolio on our Get Started page, and our team will walk you through setup.

Yes. Most portfolios start from a spreadsheet. We help structure it so properties, units, tenants, leases, opening balances and deposits arrive correctly. See Implementation.

Yes, and many organizations do for one billing cycle before retiring spreadsheets.

You can request an export of your property, tenant and financial records at any time. See our Data Policy for details.

Oxflare uses industry standard security practices to protect your data, including encrypted connections and access controls. See our Security page for more detail.

No. Every record belongs to an organization and every query is limited to it. A record from another organization is simply reported as not found. See Security.

Yes. It works with any authenticator app, comes with one-time recovery codes, and organizations can require it for everyone in the management portal.

They are encrypted at rest and never displayed again once saved. Logs redact phone numbers, tokens and passwords.

Yes. Verified database backups run nightly and uploaded files are archived weekly, with a restore drill that checks backups without touching live data.

Nothing existing is removed. When you try to add more than your plan allows, you are asked to upgrade. Upgrades apply straight away and the new price starts from the next invoice.

These are plan features. Ask us which plan includes them for your portfolio.