A spreadsheet with a tab for every block
Each year your service charge team builds estimates for the coming year and reconciles actuals for the last one. Costs such as communal cleaning, grounds maintenance, lift servicing, door entry, communal electricity and management fees come from the finance system with cost codes that do not quite match your schemes. Each block has its own tab. Each tab has formulas that apportion costs by number of homes, floor area or bedroom count, depending on how the block was set up years ago.
When a tenant or leaseholder queries their charge, finding the invoices behind a line takes hours. When the one person who understands the spreadsheet is off, everything waits.
Why service charges are so hard to produce
The calculation is not complex for one block. It becomes fragile when there are hundreds of schemes with different rules, tenures and cost lines, and the link between an invoice and a block is made by hand.
- Invoices are coded to cost centres that do not match schemes exactly.
- Apportionment rules are held in formulas, not written down.
- Tenants, shared owners and leaseholders in the same block have different arrangements.
- Estimates and actuals are built separately and reconciled late.
- There is no trail from a charge back to the invoices.
What fragile service charges cost
Errors in service charges lead to challenges, refunds and loss of trust, particularly with leaseholders. Late actuals mean late adjustments and awkward letters. Queries take hours each to answer. Costs that should have been recovered are sometimes not, and the whole process depends on a small number of people.
The service charge calculations we build
- Each scheme and block is defined once: the homes it contains, their tenure and the apportionment basis for each type of cost, written down rather than buried in formulas.
- Costs are read from your finance system with their invoices, and mapped to schemes using cost codes, supplier and site references. Unmapped costs go to a person.
- Contract costs such as cleaning and grounds maintenance are split by the contract's site list rather than by hand.
- Each scheme's rules apportion the costs to homes, handling different tenures and any caps or exclusions you set.
- Estimates for the coming year are built from contracts, budgets and last year's actuals, with changes explained line by line.
- Actuals are produced at year end with the difference from estimates for each home, ready for your statements and adjustments.
- Every charge on a home can be traced back to the invoices and the rule that produced it, which makes queries quick to answer.
| Task | Spreadsheet | Calculation service |
|---|---|---|
| Scheme rules | Formulas in tabs | Written down and applied consistently |
| Cost mapping | By hand | By code, supplier and site, with exceptions |
| Estimates | Copy last year | Built from contracts and budgets |
| Actuals | Reconciled late | Produced with differences per home |
| Queries | Hours of searching | Trail from charge to invoice |
What is recoverable and how it is apportioned depends on your tenancy agreements, leases and advisers. We apply the rules you give us and do not give legal advice.
What the service charge team gets
Estimates and actuals come from one set of rules, applied the same way to every block. Queries are answered by showing the trail. The calculations no longer depend on one person's spreadsheet knowledge. Finance can see which costs are unmapped early, rather than at year end.
Is this your service charge process?
- Service charges are calculated in large spreadsheets.
- Apportionment rules are not written down anywhere.
- Answering a query takes hours of searching invoices.
- Actuals are produced late.
- One or two people hold all the knowledge.