› Flat Chat Strata Forum › Finance, budgeting and loans › Unable to access financial info › Current Page
Good day Hyacinth,
Welcome to my world. I have exactly the same issues as you have: being an owner but not on the committee and being denied information. And in my case, I discovered payments being made that were not approved by the OC as they should have been.
After some argy-bargy with the committee and the managing agent, I recalled what I learned in first year accounting: two vital documents which every managing agent or committee treasurer have in their possession: the Cash Payments Journal and Cash Receipts Journal. These are listings of every single payment made by and receipt deposited into the strata’s accounts.
Note: this does not include actual invoices, it is a list of money in and out of the strata’s bank account. And in my case and in that of a friend’s, in another strata, the listing does not reveal who was paid or who paid into the strata.
That said, I suggest you ask for the following:
Dear Managing Agent,
Please email me the Cash Payments and Cash Receipts Journals for the strata for the period 1JAN21 to 30JUN21. I have been informed by NSW Fair Trading that I have a right to such information.
Thank you.
Once you have these documents, you can
(1) Search the listing (which should be only a few pages long for a strata of your size and a 6 mth period), establish what payments you want to look into further and then you can
(i) cross reference a payment made by the strata to any payments approved by the committee at a meeting AND
(ii) ask the agent for further information on any given payment or receipt if the committee did not approve any payment at a meeting or if the approval in the meeting does not clarify, to your satisfaction, who was paid and why
When you have listed all of your concerns for that those 6 months, email the agent with your queries PAYMENT BY PAYMENT and RECEIPT BY RECEIPT with a CC to the committee. Give them 10 days to reply.
Once you receive your response from the agent or committee, I suggest you thank them and ask for a copy of the Cash Payments and Cash Receipts Journals for the strata for the period 1JAN20 to 31DEC20.
NB: Sir Humphey is spot on when he states the hubs/portals offer “high level” information only ie aggregated. This is of course no use to anyone who wants to know about specific payments or receipts. Case in point: I could see that IN AGGREGATE insufficient levies were paid to a strata in a particular quarter. Such data is pretty useless really when I wanted to know who exactly was in arrears.
Good luck.