Owner ledgers
One lot's complete financial story — every charge, payment and correction with a running balance. The page that settles disputes.
An owner ledger is the answer to "what does lot 204 owe, and why?"
FinancesOwner accounts lists every lot with what it owes and how long it has owed it. Click a lot to open its full history. The ageing — current, 31–60, 61–90, over 90, and the oldest arrear in days — is described on arrears and interest, because that's the decision it's there to support.
What the ledger shows
Every line is a charge (fees, a levy instalment, interest on arrears, a chargeback), a payment, or a correction — with a running balance after each. Below the history you'll find the lot's invoices and the status of each.
What each payment settled
A payment doesn't just reduce a balance; it pays something. Under each payment the ledger now says what — "$1,666.67 applied to Envelope repair levy" — and where a payment spread across more than one charge, it says that too, a line per charge.
Where the payment named a charge when it was recorded, that's what it settled. Where it didn't, ManageStrata applies it to the oldest outstanding charge first and shows you the allocation it made on your behalf. That same allocation is what the ageing reports, what a Form B reports, and what interest is reckoned on — so it's worth being able to see it rather than reconstructing it from a running balance.
Money in the wrong fund, and what to do about it
A payment recorded on account credits the fund it arrived in — operating. If oldest-first then applies some of it to a special levy, that cash is sitting outside the fund s.108 requires a levy's money to be held in. The lot's page says so in one line, naming the amount and both funds, and offers the choice:
Leave it and nothing on the page is wrong — the balance, the ageing and the certificate all read the same allocation. Only which fund holds the cash differs.
Correct it by reversing the payment from the row in FinancesFund transactions and recording it again with Paying set to the charge it was for. The ledger is append-only, so a correction is posted beside the original rather than edited over it.
A corporation that has never issued a levy has one fund, nothing can cross, and the notice never appears.
Posting from the lot's own page
Two things can be recorded without leaving the ledger you're looking at:
Record a payment — a cheque or e-transfer that just arrived for this lot. The form offers the lot's outstanding charges under Paying, at what's left on each rather than its face value, so an owner paying a specific levy instalment can be recorded as doing exactly that. Leave it on account and it pays the balance down oldest first.
Issue an invoice — a chargeback, a move-in fee, or anything else owed by this lot alone.
The lot is already known, so it's stated rather than asked for. That removes the step where you read a balance here, go back to Finances, and pick the lot out of a list of all of them — which is how a receipt ends up keyed to the wrong lot.
It's the same form either way: recording a payment from Finances asks which lot first and then offers that lot's charges, so the two places can't drift apart.
A charge with no due date
Each invoice under the ledger shows its status and the date it was payable, or no due date where none was recorded. That absence matters more than it looks: a charge with no due date can never be overdue, so interest can't run on it, the ageing measures from the day it was posted rather than the day it was payable, and a Form B reports the date as not recorded.
Set due date, beside Cancel, records the date the charge was actually payable — for a special levy, the date the resolution set. A date in the past is fine; you're transcribing something already decided. Nothing on the ledger moves: no amount changes and no posting is made, and the change is in the audit trail.
Set, not changed
Only a charge with no due date can be given one. A date already on file is one interest has been reckoned from and a certificate may have disclosed, so moving it is a different act with different consequences — cancel and reissue if it's genuinely wrong.
What stays on the Finances page
Charge all units is a fee run across the whole corporation and would read here as though it charged this lot alone. An expense isn't owed by anyone. Both stay on Finances.
Reading a balance
A balance is stored as one signed number and read as three different facts, so it is shown in words rather than as a sign:
| It reads | What it means |
|---|---|
| $150.00 owing | The lot owes the corporation |
| $150.00 in credit | The corporation holds $150 of theirs — a prepayment, or a charge reversed after it was paid |
| Settled | Nothing owing |
A credit is never shown as a negative number. A minus in front of money reads as a charge, a shortfall or a mistake to almost everybody who isn't a bookkeeper — nobody looks at -$150.00 and thinks "ah, they're ahead". The direction belongs in a word, and the amount is always the amount.
Settled is not the same as good standing
A settled account is a settled account. Good standing is a status under s.53 that also depends on things this number knows nothing about, so the ledger doesn't claim it.
The running balance is the number you quote an owner. It's also the number that appears on a Form F, which is why keeping ledgers accurate isn't housekeeping — it's what makes a conveyance possible.
Settling a dispute
Ledgers exist to end arguments, and they usually do.
Open the lot and read from the last agreed point
Work forward from a date the owner accepts. The discrepancy will be a line they don't recognise.
Look for the usual three
Interest they weren't expecting; a payment received after the statement they're comparing against; a payment credited to the wrong lot.
If they're right, correct it properly
Move, reverse or cancel — never delete. The correction is posted beside the original with a reason, so the ledger explains itself. How →
Show them the ledger
Owners can see their own at any time from their portal. Pointing them there usually ends the exchange faster than an email explaining it.
Why nothing is deleted
Suppose you'd simply deleted a wrongly-recorded payment. Two years later an owner produces a bank record showing they paid, and your ledger shows nothing at all — you can neither confirm nor explain it. With a reversal, the ledger shows the payment, the reversal, and the reason. That's a defensible record.
Opening balances
When you start on ManageStrata, any lot already in arrears needs an opening balance recorded as at your start date, or their ledger begins with a fiction. Describe it clearly — "Opening balance as at 1 January 2026" — so nobody mistakes it for a charge raised that day.
Ownership changes
When a lot sells, update the owner on the roster. The ledger stays with the lot, because in most jurisdictions the obligation runs with the lot rather than the person. What the buyer and seller each owe is settled in the conveyance, using a Form F certifying the position as at the completion date.
Issue Form F from a reconciled ledger
A Form F certifies what's owed on a lot, and a conveyancer relies on it. Make sure every payment received has been recorded before you issue one — a payment entered the day after you issued the certificate is an awkward conversation.
What the owner is told
Three money events on a lot now email the owner, because until recently none of them did: an owner learned what they owed by signing in, or by falling behind.
| Event | The owner gets |
|---|---|
| A fee or charge is issued to their lot | What was charged, what it was for, and the due date |
| A payment is received on their lot | A receipt for what arrived, and what the lot owes after it |
| A special levy is raised on their lot | Their share, and when it's payable |
The receipt, as a document
An email is a poor record — it's gone from the inbox by tax time, and it never reached the owner whose roster entry has no address. So every payment row on the ledger carries two controls behind it:
- Download receipt — the receipt as a PDF, rendered on demand from the payment and this ledger. It carries the corporation's name and logo, the lot, its owners, the amount, the method, the charge it settled, the balance after it, and a short reference (
3F2A9C1D) the owner can quote over the phone. Nothing is stored, so the file you print for an owner at a meeting cannot disagree with the one already in another owner's inbox. - Email receipt — sends it again, PDF attached, to whoever is on the roster now. For the owner who moved, never got the first one, or asks for it in April.
Both are council and manager only, like the ledger they hang off, and both appear only on a payment that still stands — a reversed payment offers neither, because a receipt for it would certify money the corporation does not hold.
When you record a payment, the confirmation says whether the automatic receipt actually went out and names the next thing to do if it didn't. How that reads →
Three paths deliberately send nothing
Importing payments — a corporation bringing a year of receipts in from QuickBooks would otherwise email every owner a receipt for a payment they made last March, which is the documented reason that tooling exists. Opening balances — they state a position rather than charging anyone. And every reversal, void and correction: an owner told "payment received" and then nothing when it's reversed has been misinformed by us, and undoing a notice needs its own message, which doesn't exist yet. Tell them yourself.
An undated charge simply says what was charged. A due date is only required on a levy — s.108 puts the payment date in the resolution — so an ordinary fee invoice can be issued without one, and a notice that invented a date would be telling an owner they were late on a day nobody set.
Nothing in these notices threatens interest. BC has no statutory late fee, and interest is only chargeable where your own bylaws set a rate. See arrears and interest.
Owners who have declined email don't receive them. That's the same consent control that governs announcements, applied the same way.
Statements for owners
An owner can see their own ledger any time. For a formal statement — for a mortgage application, an accountant, a dispute — generate it from the same page.
Spotting problems early
Owner accounts is your arrears report, oldest arrear first: the lot that has owed longest is the lot the next decision is about. Anything more than one period behind deserves attention this month, not at year end. See arrears and interest.
On the Council plan, the Collections agent watches this for you: it spots overdue accounts and drafts a polite, rules-aware reminder for you to review and send. See AI agents.
Still stuck? Open Support in the top bar of the app, ask the Assistant, or contact us.