Owners without email: invitations, minutes and circulars by post

Sabine Krüger runs a management practice in Bremen. One of her associations is Lindenallee 12, twenty-four units. Nineteen owners use the portal, and three have no account there but read email. Two get everything on paper: Mr Brandt, eighty-one, who does not own a computer, and a community of heirs whose contact person gave only a postal address.

The ordinary assembly is set for Thursday, 26 November 2026. Before then the invitation and agenda have to reach all twenty-four owners, and after the evening every one of them should get the minutes. This article shows how Ms Krüger handles that in Condomana without keeping a separate list for the two paper owners.

Every person has a delivery channel

A person's page, opened from the association's list of owners, shows their Delivery channel: Portal, Email, Post or Automatic. Most records stay on Automatic, and Condomana then decides in this order. Someone with a portal account gets the notice in the portal. Someone without one but with an email address gets an email with the documents attached. Someone with only a complete postal address gets a letter. A person with none of the three counts as unreachable.

A channel chosen explicitly wins as long as it can be honoured. If someone chose post but the record lacks a postcode, Condomana falls back to the automatic order and names the person in the preview. Ms Krüger therefore sees before sending when an owner will be reached differently from what they asked for.

Mr Brandt is the simple case: no account, no email, a complete address. He lands on post automatically. For the community of heirs Ms Krüger enters the contact person's address and sets the channel to Post explicitly, because the family asked for it.

The invitation: text form and three weeks

In Germany, § 24 (4) WEG requires the assembly to be convened in text form, and the notice period should be at least three weeks unless the matter is especially urgent. Text form, under § 126b BGB, means a legible declaration on a durable medium that names the person making it. An email meets that, and so does a letter.

Ms Krüger creates the assembly under Decision-making → Assemblies. While it is a draft, the page names the last day to send the invitations, 5 November 2026: the meeting date less twenty-one days. Condomana only warns; nothing is blocked.

She writes the invitation herself or, with the AI features switched on, uses Draft invitation. The draft takes the date, the venue and the numbered agenda from the assembly. She reads it, changes what does not fit and clicks Publish as announcement. That opens the announcement composer with the title and text filled in. Nothing has been published yet.

In the composer she ticks Also deliver outside the portal. The preview for Lindenallee appears below it: 19 via portal, 3 via email, 2 by post, 0 unreachable. Had anyone been unreachable, their name would be a link, and Ms Krüger could add the missing address before publishing.

She publishes on Friday, 30 October, six days earlier than she has to. She allows generously for the post, because a few days can pass between the office printer and the recipient's letterbox.

Print in-house or have it printed

How letters leave the office is set once under Settings → Post & letters.

With nothing configured, the practice prints them itself. Every send that includes post produces one PDF with all its letters: a cover page laid out to DIN 5008 with the address in the window of a DL envelope, then the documents. Each letter starts on a new sheet, also when printing on both sides, so one owner's first page never ends up on the back of another owner's letter. Ms Krüger downloads the PDF under Communication & filing → Letters, and the letters then show Handed to print. The status goes no further, because Condomana cannot see whether she takes the envelopes to the post office that day.

The other option is the practice's own account with LetterXpress, a print-and-post service. The practice signs the contract itself and enters its username and API key; Condomana checks the credentials with a live call before storing them encrypted. Test mode is the default, in which jobs are not printed and cost nothing. In live mode each letter goes out as its own job, black and white or colour, single or double sided. The list under Letters shows each letter's status, from Queued through Submitted to Sent, and its price once LetterXpress reports it. A letter can still be cancelled there while LetterXpress allows it, and a failed one can be sent again.

If the organisation has no complete postal address on file, the cover page shows only its name as the sender. The address is kept under Settings → Billing.

What Condomana records about the send

Sent means LetterXpress has handed the letter to the post. Nobody reports back whether or when it reaches the owner, and Condomana does not offer registered mail. What the software keeps is the send: which letter went to whom, with which subject, when, and with which status. If an owner later says they never received an invitation, that shows the letter was sent. For proof that it arrived you still need your own means.

After the assembly: the minutes

Under § 24 (6) WEG, minutes of the resolutions must be taken without delay. They are signed by the chair, one owner and, if an advisory board has been appointed, its chair or deputy, and every owner is entitled to inspect them. Many practices send the minutes to everyone anyway, for a practical reason: under § 45 WEG an action to challenge a resolution must be filed within one month of the vote. An owner who receives the minutes three weeks later has little time to read them.

Ms Krüger files the signed minutes as a document of the association. She then writes a short announcement ("Minutes of the assembly of 26 November"), attaches the document and ticks delivery outside the portal again. Mr Brandt and the heirs receive a letter with the announcement text on the cover page and the minutes behind it. Only PDF attachments are enclosed. A photo or a spreadsheet cannot be printed reliably and is left out, and the cover page lists only what is actually in the envelope.

Circulars and individual letters

The same applies to any circular. Every announcement can also go out by email or post, to the association's current owners. Tenants do not receive letters this way, even when the announcement is visible to all residents in the portal.

Documents that differ for each owner, such as the individual settlements, take another route. Under Documents there is Serial distribution: you upload all the individual PDFs at once, check which owner each file is assigned to, and confirm the mapping in a summary. Delivery outside the portal can be switched on there too. Each letter then contains exactly the one file assigned to that owner.

An owner who receives a letter this year may be in the portal next year. How to invite owners and see who is still missing is in Taking over a building from the previous manager. The whole path from the agenda to the resolutions register is described in Assembly season.

The essentials

• Every person has a delivery channel, and the preview before sending counts who is reached which way and who cannot be reached at all.
• You send the invitation as an announcement, and with one tick also by email and post. The line on the assembly names the last day for three weeks' notice; allow for the post on top of that.
• The practice prints letters itself from one combined PDF, or its own LetterXpress account prints and posts them.
• Condomana records which letter went to whom and when. Whether it arrived is something you still establish another way.