Condo bookkeeping, reserve funds & PAD — the real rules

It is a financial operating system built specifically for Ontario condominium corporations: collecting owner dues (including pre-authorized debit), paying vendors, reconciling the bank statement against the ledger, keeping Operating and Reserve funds separately tracked, enforcing board approval limits, and generating board-ready monthly financial statements. It replaces spreadsheets and generic accounting software with something built around how a condo corporation's money actually has to move.

Both. A property management company can run every corporation in its portfolio from one system, each with its own fiscal year, banking, and approval limits. A self-managed condominium — one with no property management company involved — gets the same dues collection, vendor payment, and reconciliation tools directly, run by its own board and bookkeeper.

Generic accounting software doesn't know what a condominium corporation legally is. It has no concept of a reserve fund that can only be spent on major repair and replacement, no owner-level PAD collection tied to a unit's declared common interest, and no approval hierarchy matching who is actually allowed to authorize a payment under a corporation's own bylaws. Those rules are built into the platform rather than left for a bookkeeper to enforce by hand.

Until a corporation completes its first reserve fund study and implements a proposed plan under section 94, its total reserve fund contribution must be the greater of a calculated amount or 10% of the budgeted common expenses (excluding the reserve fund contribution itself). In practice, for a brand-new corporation this generally means at least 10% of the operating budget goes to the reserve fund from day one.

A corporation created after section 94 came into force must conduct a reserve fund study within the year following registration of its declaration and description, and at prescribed intervals afterward.

The reserve fund is restricted to major repair and replacement of the common elements and assets of the corporation. It cannot be used to cover a shortfall in day-to-day operating expenses — which is the core legal reason Operating and Reserve money has to be tracked as genuinely separate at all times, not just labeled differently in one shared account.

Owners contribute to common expenses — including a special assessment — in the proportions specified in the declaration, not equally per unit and not based on how much a particular owner used whatever is being repaired. A unit with a larger declared common interest percentage pays a proportionally larger share.

No. An owner is not exempt from contributing to common expenses even if they've waived use of the common elements, are making a claim against the corporation, or are restricted from using the common elements. The obligation runs with the unit.

The payee must provide a Confirmation of the PAD agreement's key terms at least 10 calendar days before the due date of the first PAD — unless the owner has authorized waiving or shortening that period, in which case the confirmation must instead be provided within 5 calendar days after the first debit.

Yes. Once an owner instructs the corporation to stop issuing PADs, the corporation must use best efforts to cancel it in the next processing cycle and, in any case, must stop issuing new PADs within 30 calendar days — sooner if the owner's own PAD agreement sets a shorter cancellation period.

A failed or NSF payment is flagged against that specific unit rather than silently disappearing into the corporation's overall numbers. The platform keeps the unit's ledger, the dues collection batch, and the bank reconciliation all pointing at the same failed transaction, so a bookkeeper can follow up with the owner and re-attempt collection without losing track of which unit still owes the period's dues.

Each month's real bank statement is imported and matched line by line against the corporation's own ledger — dues collected, vendor payments cleared, inter-fund transfers — until every line is accounted for. The bank statement itself is never edited to fit the books; only the ledger side (an invoice or journal entry) is corrected when something doesn't match, since the bank's own record is the ground truth of what actually happened.

It's the board-ready financial statement package generated directly from a corporation's own reconciled ledger for a given month, rather than assembled by hand. A month only reaches a Fully Reconciled status once every dues batch, invoice, and bank line for that period has actually been matched — the platform will not let you paper over an unreconciled month with a clean-looking report.

Yes. Each corporation's data — owners, banking details, invoices, ledger — is structurally isolated from every other corporation on the platform, including other corporations managed by the same property management company. A staff member's access is scoped per property and per role.