Our Community Manager is Great… But Their Accounting is Bad

You have a problem: you love your specific condo or HOA manager when it comes to their personality, knowledge of maintaining the property and getting thru the to-do lists BUT they do a poor job with the accounting tasks.  Financial reports are late and have mistakes, vendor checks take a long time to get paid and unit owners complain that they don’t get answers to payment questions.  Your community manager is great but their accounting is bad.  What is the board to do?

How does this happen?  Easy – people do what they like to do and don’t do what they don’t like to do.  Managers have to know a lot about law, administration, maintenance, capital projects, etc.  Many mangers come from an administrative or maintenance background and are not formally trained in accounting.  They may be solo practitioners and trying to do all the work themselves and the thing they enjoy least gets done last meaning it does not get the focus it needs.  They may have a few admin and accounting helpers but maybe they didn’t hire right or have the time to provide good training, or install the right systems.  The main issue is there is just not enough time to do it all and accounting falls to the wayside.

The Board Has 3 Options:

1 – Put Up With It

Often a volunteer board is busy with life and the last thing they want to do is make more work by changing the status-quo.  They can just except that they have someone that is flawed and put up with the deficiency.  You can mention your dissatisfaction with the accounting that the manager will acknowledge but you probably won’t get the person to change.  The manager is busy or not equipped to learn accounting, put in new systems or hire new or better staff.

2 – Look For A New Manager

Trying to find the manager that has it all can be like searching for a needle in a haystack.  I’ve seen just as many boards change management companies because of manager personality conflicts or not getting thru to-do lists as I’ve seen move because of bad accounting.  The alternative manager may be great at accounting but may not have as good a personality, may not be as knowledgeable about maintenance or be as efficient with getting thru your to-do lists.

3 – Divide Up The Work

A work around for this scenario is to let your current manager do what they do best and find a supporting service to do a great job of the financial management tasks.  Many boards may not know that this option is available or would think that their manager would refuse it outright.  However, the manager knows their weakness and would rather maintain some of your business than face the prospect of losing all of the business.  Most or all of the cost for the accounting will come out of manager’s “full service” fee.  The service could add a little expense but is offset by the better service and improved features that save the board time and increase their control over association funds.  Also the change can add options like online payments that unit owner’s love.  The manager can make up the loss of income by freeing up time to manage another property since they are no longer bogged down with the accounting tasks.  It is a win-win.

To learn more about how you can keep your manager & switch your community’s financial reporting schedule a consultation to brainstorm with us.