Frequently asked questions

Yes — all three, plus Māori land trusts more generally. GDPro was built specifically for Māori land entities rather than adapted from general business software, so shareholders, shares, blocks, life interests and hapū structures are first-class concepts. It is in production across 70+ Māori organisations and almost 900 whenua blocks, and has been since 2002. Whether you call them owners, shareholders or beneficiaries, the register works the same way.

Most trusts start on a spreadsheet and move to purpose-built software once the register grows past a few hundred owners, or once distributions and successions start taking days rather than hours. GDPro is the register and distribution system used by 70+ Māori land trusts, incorporations and iwi organisations in Aotearoa. It holds the owner register, share transactions, successions, distributions, tax and IR filing in one place, rather than across a spreadsheet, an accounting system and a folder of letters.

We import your existing owner and share data, then set up the trust — trust details, total shares, and the direct-credit account name and number if you pay by direct credit. Once imported we run a Register Summary report with you so you can confirm the total shareholding matches what you expect before anything goes live. Setup is quoted upfront, typically $499 to $3,000 + GST depending on owner numbers and the state of the data we are given.

Minutes, not weeks. Our largest client distribution pays over 12,000 owners — calculated, taxed per owner, reconciled and written to the bank file in a single run. You can also run trial distributions first and check the report calculations before committing anything.

Yes. GDPro applies NRWT, RWT and Māori Authority Distribution rules automatically, per owner, to the rules in force on the day of the distribution. The right tax comes off the right payment without anyone working it out in Excel first.

Yes. GDPro produces IR filing files for Māori Authority Distributions, RWT and NRWT that you upload straight into Inland Revenue's investment income reporting service — no manual returns. It has done this since IR's April 2020 investment income reporting deadline. Note that IR requires at least one of a contact address, email address or phone number on record for each owner being filed, so a tidy register matters.

GDPro builds direct-credit files that you import straight into your online banking rather than keying payments one at a time. The major New Zealand banks are supported, including ANZ and BNZ.

Yes. Overseas owners are paid through BNZ International Direct Credit, which is built into the normal payment system, and there is a separate process for Australian bank accounts. One thing to know upfront: BNZ requires each overseas owner's BIC/SWIFT code and bank clearing code, and that information has to come from the owner. There is no way to look it up automatically, so it is entered once against the owner's record and then reused.

Mark it as presented or cancelled in one click. A cancelled payment returns the funds to the owner's record automatically, so the balances still reconcile and the money is not lost track of. Every transaction carries an audit trail you can search years later.

Successions are recorded to future generations with a full transaction history and audit log. Life interests are handled properly, including remaindermen — those who inherit the shares once the life interest ends — which is where most spreadsheet registers come unstuck. Succession letters can be customised to your trust's own wording.

No, and we would rather say so plainly than imply otherwise. There is no fully automated way to reconcile a trust register against Māori Land Online. The practical method is to request a derivation report from the Māori Land Court covering successions since your last review, then enter those successions. Be aware that the shares on a Māori Land Court spreadsheet sometimes do not match the totals shown on Māori Land Online — that has to be resolved with Court staff directly.

No. Cross-block ownership is normal here, not an edge case. An owner descended from multiple land blocks has one owner record covering every block they belong to, so an address or bank account change updates once rather than in five places.

Yes. Drag and drop a scanned document straight onto an owner record and GDPro links it automatically. There is no separate document-management system to license or learn.

Yes, and it is included with GDPro at no extra cost. Register attendance straight from the owner database on the day, and update addresses, phone numbers and bank details as people come through the door — the changes flow back into the register instantly rather than sitting on a paper form until someone types them up.

In an Auckland data centre. Māori data stays in Aotearoa, in line with Māori Data Sovereignty principles — no customer data is stored overseas. Each GDPro Grants trust also gets its own separate database and admin space, not one shared with other organisations we host.

GDPro Grants is our online iwi membership registration and grants system. Members register themselves, update their own address, contact and bank details, view their grant history and apply for grants online. It is a separate system from GDPro, our share register and distributions software — they solve different problems and have their own subscriptions.

Through a workflow that follows iwi structure rather than fighting it. Registrants apply, verifiers triage, hapū admins approve at hapū level, and site managers finalise. Successful grants flow straight through to the bank direct-credit file. Every state change is audited.

Yes. Every grant form is custom-coded from your existing PDF, so the online form captures exactly what your trust already asks for, with validation on the fields that need it. Education grants, kaumātua grants and scholarship applications are all common. Form setup is $1,499 + GST once per grant type.

Yes — that is the point of it. Members maintain their own registration, address, contact and bank details from their own login. The trust office stops being a typing pool for change-of-address forms, and the register stays current between distributions.

GDPro register and distribution plans start at $99 + GST per month, sized to the number of owners you manage, with one-off setup between $499 and $3,000 + GST. GDPro Grants is a separate subscription at $199 + GST per month per trust, plus $49 + GST per month for each grant you have running, and $1,499 + GST once per grant form built. Our pricing is published — you do not have to sit through a sales call to find out what it costs.

Email support@arisesoftware.co.nz and you reach the people who build the software, not a ticket queue. Most of our clients have been with us for more than a decade, and several say in their own words that the thing they value most is getting a straight answer quickly. There is also a knowledge base and a set of training guides covering the register, transactions, successions, life interests, reporting and AGMs.

Yes. Tell us roughly how many owners you have and we will put you in touch with an organisation running a register of a similar size, so you can ask them rather than us.