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CBF – whilst I understand that Strata Managers cannot be expected to customise their accounting software, and in this case the “chart of accounts”, to accommodate the particular needs of individual Owners Corporations (O/C) as their clients, the systems that I’ve seen are necessarily able to adapt (as opposed to customise) an otherwise unused income and expenditure account to suit.
For example, whilst it may be unreasonable for your Strata Manager to create an additional account called “Special By-Law Payments” just for your Plan, there would be absolutely nothing wrong or difficult about your Strata Manager using a standard income account such as “sundry income” to record such payments; after all, your O/C would know what those payments represented.
The “planning” (or scheduling) of such payments could be achieved using the same process that your Strata Manager applies to generate Levy Contributions Invoices across the different Plans that they manage, in circumstances where the quarterly dates for those would vary over the year, and the actual collection process involves nothing more than an extra line on the existing Invoice for relevant Owners’ Levy Contributions.
Where there’s a will there’s a way, but the key point is determining in some equitable and defensible way the amount of the payment made by Owner/s for the use of Common Property, where that could involve everything from using extra space (m2) derived as a percentage of the Lot as existing, and then applying that to the Lot’s Levies in order to strike a separate “sundry” amount (e.g. Levies $800/qtr, Lot size 100m2 and Common Property used 10m2 = 10% extra space at a cost of $80/qtr), to using a professionally conducted market-based valuation.