Year-end in an owners' association: from the invoice pile to each owner's statement in the portal

Anja Petersen does the accounts for eleven associations at a management practice in Kiel, the largest of them Förde-Blick with twenty-four units. Until now her year-end went like this: in January two binders of invoices on the desk, in March the settlement in a spreadsheet, and in April twenty-four individual statements printed, put in envelopes and posted. Then in May an owner phones because he has mislaid his.

What follows is the same year-end in Condomana, from the first invoice to the day an owner opens his statement in the portal himself.

One limitation first: Condomana has no bank connection and keeps no receivables ledger. Account balances, unpaid contributions and reminders stay in your bank and your accounting. Condomana keeps the booking journal for each property and settles from it.

January and February: the invoices

Invoices come in by three routes, and each has a shortcut:

• When an invoice arrives by email at the organisation address, Record as booking in the message thread files it as a document and opens the booking form with the PDF beside it.
• When it is a PDF on the computer, Ms Petersen drops the file into the form on the Bookings page.
• A paper invoice she scans and then handles the same way.

With the AI features switched on, Condomana reads out the supplier, invoice number, amount and date, and suggests a cost type from the property's chart of cost types. Two checks run alongside it that need no AI. One speaks up when the same invoice has already been captured, even if that was under another property. The other fires when the amount lies far above what has been usual for that cost type. Neither warning blocks anything. Nothing is booked until Ms Petersen has checked, corrected and saved.

The cost type is where she looks closely, because the distribution key depends on it and the key decides who pays. Why AI may suggest the cost type but never set it is explained in AI invoice capture.

Bookings go by payment date. She takes the payments themselves from the bank statement and records them in the journal. If an invoice belongs to a defect, the repair of the circulation pump for instance, the manager links the booking on the defect. That way the defect shows what it cost.

The reserve

Condomana keeps the maintenance reserve as its own balance. A contribution is a cost type that flows into the reserve and is apportioned to the owners like any other cost type. The circulation pump was paid from the reserve by resolution. That expense lowers the reserve and is not apportioned a second time, and the withdrawal names the resolution that authorised it.

March: tidy up, then compute

Before computing the first draft, Ms Petersen opens Settings → Data health. A unit without an owner, or co-ownership shares that do not add up, would otherwise hold up the settlement later on, at a less convenient moment. Förde-Blick scores 100.

Under Annual settlements she picks the year and clicks Compute draft. Condomana apportions the actual costs per unit by each cost type's key (co-ownership shares, equal per unit, living space, or a custom key) and sets them against the target advances from the advance payment schedule. Rounding is cent-exact by the largest-remainder method, so every split adds up to the last cent.

The page also shows how far the target advances differ from the income actually booked. Behind that gap are arrears, prepayments or other kinds of income. The settlement itself works with the target figures, and you follow up arrears in your accounting.

Under Details she reviews the draft unit by unit and goes through it with the advisory board before it goes to the assembly.

April: resolution and approval

Since the reform, owners in Germany no longer resolve on the settlement as a whole but on the additional contributions and the adjustment of advances (§ 28 (2) WEG). What that means for wording the resolution is covered in The annual statement: from booking to a resolution that holds.

After the assembly Ms Petersen clicks Approve and enters the resolution's number from the register. From then on the settlement, its lines and every booking in the period can no longer be changed. What the owners have received cannot shift unnoticed, not even through a booking added by mistake in June.

Each owner's statement in the portal

With approval, each owner's own statement appears in their portal under Annual statements, also as a PDF. It shows their share of every cost type, their advances and the balance that results. They see only their own units, and before approval they see nothing at all. An announcement lets the association know the statements are ready.

That does away with the May phone call about the mislaid statement. Questions about individual lines will keep coming. If the organisation has switched on the AI features, the owner can put them to the assistant in the portal. It answers from the documents that owner may see and from his own approved settlement figures, and it never draws on a neighbour's.

If the individual statements are still produced in another program, they go out through serial distribution. It takes one PDF per owner, Condomana proposes the recipient from the content, and nothing is delivered until you have confirmed.

Statement of assets

After each calendar year the owners receive the statement of assets, which in Germany is the report § 28 (4) WEG requires. Condomana computes it from the reserves and the year's bookings: balance at the start, contributions, withdrawals and balance at the end, each with every individual movement. On approval it is frozen and filed as a PDF among the documents, where every owner can open it.

The statement also says what it does not cover. Account balances and unpaid contributions come from your accounting, because Condomana has no bank connection.

When the tax auditor comes

The tax audit export produces, for a period, an archive containing the booking journal, voucher index, cost types, distribution keys, settlements and economic plans. The data comes as CSV files together with the descriptive index file an audit tool expects. For German properties this matches the data-handover format under § 147 (6) AO.

And already next year

In the same pass Ms Petersen budgets the following year per cost type under Economic plans. Once the assembly approves the plan, the approval writes the advance payment schedule for every unit. A one-off measure such as the gutters runs as a special levy and is apportioned by a key she chooses herself.

What Condomana does not do here

Condomana has no bank connection, does no payment matching and sends no reminders. Nor does it produce an operating-cost statement for owners who let their flat. The individual statement settles accounts between the owner and the association; the statement to their tenant is a separate one.

The essentials

• Condomana reads the invoices out, and nothing is booked until you save. You set the cost type yourself, because it decides who pays.
• The reserve is its own balance. Whatever is paid from it, Condomana does not apportion a second time.
• After approval, the settlement and the period's bookings stay as they are.
• Each owner fetches their statement from the portal after approval and sees only their own.