Going digital in condominium management: a roadmap in five steps

You know the setup: a filing cabinet per building, one spreadsheet for the co-ownership shares, a second for the advance payments, a "resolutions" folder on the network drive, and the actual truth in the head of the colleague who has been there fourteen years. It works, often remarkably well. It only gets difficult when someone falls ill, when an owner asks to see the 2019 statement, or when you take over a building and discover the previous manager worked exactly the same way.

This article describes how to get out of that step by step, in an order that still holds when an assembly season starts in the middle of it.

Why most attempts stall

The usual mistake is treating the move as a project with a start and an end. You buy software, block out a weekend, and on Monday everything is supposed to be new. That fails reliably, and there are three reasons for it.

The old data is worse than you think. Mostly that means gaps. The co-ownership shares are right, but three units are missing the date the owner changed. Opening balances exist, but only as a balance and not as individual bookings. You find out during the import, and that is where the project stops.

Day-to-day work does not pause. While you migrate, defect reports, invoices and questions keep arriving. As long as the new system does not yet carry the load and the old one is half abandoned, you work in both. That is the phase in which projects get cancelled.

There is no point at which it has paid off. Move everything at once and you have months of effort and no benefit. Start small and after two weeks you have something you would not give back.

Migrate a single building, and let the rest of the practice run as before in the meantime.

Step 1: one building, completely

Take a single building, one you know well and whose figures are clean. The biggest or most complicated one is a poor choice for this. Twelve to thirty units is a good size: big enough to be real, and small enough that a mistake does not cost you the whole day.

Bring that building in completely, with units, owners and their co-ownership shares (Miteigentumsanteile), opening balances and the last annual statement. A half-maintained building cannot answer the question this step is about, namely whether the whole thing holds up.

What you learn there applies to your whole portfolio: how long capture takes per unit, where your old data has gaps, and whether the software works the way you work.

Step 2: the documents, not the accounting

Nearly everyone skips the second step, even though it gives the highest return per hour of effort: the documents.

Digitising the accounting pays off late, because you only find out at the next statement whether it was worth it. With documents it is the other way round. From the day the declaration of division, minutes, insurance policies and contracts of a building sit searchable in one place, a particular kind of phone call stops: "could you send me that again…".

This step also reaches the owners. In an owner portal every co-owner sees their building's documents themselves, which removes exactly the work you could never bill for. This is the first point at which going digital makes the practice cheaper, and it gets tidier into the bargain.

Start with what is needed today, meaning the last three years. The older history can follow later, or never; paper from 2011 is rarely asked for.

Step 3: the resolutions

Once a building is digital and the documents are in place, the Beschluss-Sammlung, the register of resolutions, comes next. It is no fun, but it is a statutory duty on which every handover turns. § 24 (7) WEG requires a consecutively numbered register, and a manager who does not keep one finds out when an owner sues or a successor demands it.

Kept digitally, the register mainly takes the numbering off your hands. A register that arises from the resolutions themselves has no gaps and no numbers issued twice, because nobody has to issue them.

The details, with challenges, corrections and handover, have their own article: Keeping the register of resolutions right.

Step 4: only now the accounting

The Wirtschaftsplan (economic plan) and Jahresabrechnung (annual statement) come last, deliberately. They carry the hardest requirements, and they are where a mistake costs most: a cost type apportioned by the wrong key only surfaces when thirty owners are holding their statement.

Switch at the start of a financial year, never mid-year. A stub year across two systems produces a statement nobody can follow, yourself included.

Also take opening balances for what they are, namely opening balances. Trying to re-enter five years of booking history is the single most common reason migrations peter out. The old statement stays valid even though it came out of another system.

Step 5: the rest of the portfolio

Only now comes the bulk, and by now it is boring, which is exactly how it should be. You know how long a building takes and which data you are missing, and you have an order that worked.

Two recommendations:

• Sort by management contract rather than by size. Buildings whose contract is up for renewal anyway are the natural next candidates.
• One building a week is fast enough. At forty buildings you are through in a year with nobody working late. Wanting to go faster should have a good reason behind it.

What this means for the old data

It gets concrete with the export from your current software. Some vendors make it easy, some make it deliberately hard, and with some the export technically exists but is incomplete.

That topic has its own traps, so we wrote it up separately: Getting your data out of your old software.

One principle applies in advance: run every import as a dry run first. An import you cannot look at beforehand is a leap in the dark. And read the reconciliation before you commit.

The AI comes last

AI helps in property management exactly where structured data already exists: reading out invoices, suggesting document metadata, drafting replies. Pointed at a filing cabinet it can do nothing.

Steps 1 to 4 are therefore the precondition for the AI part being worth anything at all. Start at the other end and you have bought a feature that cannot run on your data.

What actually works today and what is sales copy: What AI in property management can really do today.

Effort and timeline

These are the orders of magnitude at which practices actually make the move. Anyone promising you a weekend has either not seen your portfolio or is not counting the data work.

What you do not have to do

Some things are sold as mandatory and are not:

• You do not have to digitise everything. Paper from ten years ago may stay paper.
• You do not have to treat every building the same. A three-unit community needs no portal.
• You do not have to re-enter the history. Opening balances are enough.
• You do not have to wait for a perfect system. The building that is digital today is worth more than the concept that will be finished next year.

The first step is the hardest, and it is smaller than it looks: one building, complete, in two hours. After that you plan the rest from experience with your own portfolio.