The treatment of dipole moments (mu), polarizabilities (alpha), and hyperpolarizabilities (beta, gamma) in push-pull systems using electric field simulation for the substituents is reanalyzed and tested by comparison with ab initio Hartree-Fock calculations on representative donor-acceptor (D/A) polyenes. Both vibrational and electronic contributions are properly taken into account. We find that the field simulation approach can be applied semiquantitatively to relate the odd-order (mu, beta) properties only. Even for these properties, however, features such as the chain-length dependence cannot be reproduced due to the excessively delocalized description of the D/A substituents.