Why We Built DoorBrief

The 15th of Every Month

If you manage properties, you know the date. The 15th. That's when AppFolio generates owner packets and the clock starts ticking.

The first time we sat down to review one, it was a 54-page PDF. Fifty-four pages. For a single owner with about 20 properties.

Here's what the actual workflow looks like, every single month:

• Download the ZIP file from AppFolio
• Extract and open each owner's PDF
• Read every page — consolidated summary, individual property cash summaries, transaction details
• Pull out the key numbers: rent collected, disbursements, expenses
• Identify anything notable — a vacancy, a large repair, a unit turn
• Write a professional email summarizing the month
• Double-check everything before sending

Time per owner: 30 to 45 minutes. If you're thorough, closer to 45.

That HVAC replacement? It was the kind of thing an owner absolutely needs to hear about. But finding it meant reading 37 pages of routine transactions first.

Multiply That by 15 Owners

One owner is manageable. The problem is property managers don't have one owner.

Here's the math:

• 5 owners: 2–3 hours. Tight but doable.
• 15 owners: 7+ hours. There goes your entire day.
• 30 owners: Impossible without dedicated staff.

And this isn't a one-time project. It's every single month. Like clockwork. The packets drop, and you're back at it.

It's not just AppFolio, either. Buildium generates similar packets. Yardi does. DoorLoop does. Every PM software creates the same problem — structured financial data locked inside PDFs that a human has to manually read and interpret.

We Tried ChatGPT First

We're not going to pretend we had some brilliant original idea. The first thing we did was what everyone does — we uploaded an owner packet to ChatGPT and asked it to summarize the financials.

It was… close. Dangerously close.

• Numbers were close but not exact — $68,932 instead of $65,245
• Transposed digits: $4,218 became $4,281
• Wrong properties assigned to wrong figures
• Rounding errors on disbursement calculations
• Expenses from one owner blended into another owner's summary
• Confident tone even when the numbers were completely wrong

“Close” is fine for a recipe summary. It is not fine for financial reporting. When you tell an owner their disbursement was $12,400 and the actual number was $11,800, that's a $600 gap. That's the kind of mistake that ends a management relationship.

The Trust Problem

Property management runs on trust. An owner is handing you their most valuable asset and saying “take care of this.” The monthly statement is the primary touchpoint where that trust gets reinforced or destroyed.

One wrong disbursement figure and the conversation changes. Here's what happens:

• Owner checks the email against the AppFolio portal
• Numbers don't match
• Owner wonders what else is wrong
• Owner starts reviewing everything more carefully
• Trust erodes. Micromanagement begins.
• Eventually: “We're going to find another management company.”

We've seen it happen. A property manager spends years building a relationship with an owner, and one sloppy email can unravel it.

So we couldn't ship something that was “mostly right.” It had to be exactly right. Every dollar. Every cent. Every property.

So We Split the Work

The breakthrough was simple once we saw it: AI is great at reading and understanding. Code is great at computing and verifying. So stop asking AI to do both.

We split the work into layers:

• Extraction layer: Read the PDF and identify every transaction, property, and financial figure on the page.
• Verification layer: Code independently computes totals, cross-references amounts, and validates every number against the source document.
• Communication layer: Write the email prose — natural, professional language that turns raw data into a story an owner actually wants to read.
• Final check: Every dollar amount in the generated email is matched back to the verified data. If a number doesn't match, it gets corrected before you ever see it.

AI writes the narrative. Code guarantees the numbers. Neither does the other's job.

This is what we mean by “verified facts.” Not AI summaries with a disclaimer. Actual verified financial data computed from the source documents, presented in language your owners will understand.

What DoorBrief Does Today

We started with AppFolio because it's what we knew. It's one of the most widely used PM platforms, and the owner packet format is consistent enough to build reliable extraction against.

Here's what you get:

• Upload your AppFolio owner packet ZIPs — current and prior month
• Get a verified financial summary in about 60 seconds
• Professional, ready-to-send email for each owner
• Month-over-month comparison — see exactly what changed
• Notable transaction flagging — large expenses, unit turns, and unusual activity surfaced automatically
• Property-level tracking across your entire portfolio

The email DoorBrief generates is the email you would have written yourself — if you had 45 minutes per owner and unlimited patience. Same professional tone. Same level of detail. Just without the manual grind.

What's Next

We started with AppFolio, but the problem is universal. Every property manager using every PM platform faces the same monthly cycle.

Here's where we're headed:

• Buildium support — same verified facts approach, different source format
• Yardi support — expanding to the enterprise PM market
• DoorLoop support — covering the newer platforms too
• Email context forwarding — forward an owner's question and get a data-backed response
• Warranty detection — automatically flag items that might still be under warranty
• Document auto-filing — receipts, invoices, and statements organized without manual sorting

The goal is simple: if it's repetitive financial paperwork that a property manager has to do every month, we want to handle it.

— The DoorBrief Team