Twenty years of knowing what to check is not a feature request
Every agency that has been doing this a while has a list. The clause you always check because of that deal in 2019. The thing about older strata schemes in that particular council area. The question you ask about the lease that has saved a client twice.
It usually lives in one person's head, plus a spreadsheet nobody else opens, plus the induction conversation you have with every new hire and forget half of.
Load it once
A Playbook check is a title, a description of what to look for, a category, and optionally a document type to restrict it to. Add them one at a time, or import the spreadsheet you already have, in CSV or XLSX, up to 500 rows.
The import shows you a preview before anything is saved: every row that validates, and every row that doesn't with the specific reason it failed. Only the valid rows go in, and only once you confirm. Nobody has to guess why row 87 vanished.
From then on, every document analysis on every deal includes your checks alongside the standard ones. Playbook checks only ever add coverage. They never remove or override anything.
It stays yours
This is the part worth being unambiguous about. Your Playbook is locked to your organisation's workspace. No other agency using Trace can see it, use it, or benefit from it. It is never merged into anyone else's analysis, and it is never repackaged into a shared or community ruleset.
Your judgement is the asset. Pooling it into a generic ruleset would be taking the one thing that makes your agency worth hiring and giving it to everyone you compete with.
Two honest limitations
There's no edit or delete on an existing check. The closest is an active/inactive toggle, which asks for a reason when you switch one off and keeps it visible under Show retired. That's deliberate for an audit trail, and it does mean a typo in a check title is with you for good.
You can sort by most triggered, but read that for what it is: how often a check has been included in an analysis. It's a relevance signal, not a count of how often the check actually caught something. Useful for spotting checks nobody's using. Not a performance measure.
None of this replaces judgement. It just means the judgement doesn't leave the building when the person who has it does. More on what Trace actually checks.
We're building this with a small first group of buyer's agents. If your firm's real checklist is currently a spreadsheet, we'd like to import it and see what it catches.
Apply for a founding partner spot