Form B and Form F
Generate BC's Information Certificate and Certificate of Payment for a lot, charge for them, email them, and keep a register of every request.
Strata forms generates the statutory certificates a lot needs when it sells or refinances, filled from what's already in ManageStrata.
The two BC forms
Form F — Certificate of Payment. Certifies that the lot is clear to transfer. A conveyance can't complete without it: the Land Title Office needs one for a s.256 transfer. Short, and consequential — a buyer's lawyer relies on it.
It is not a statement of what a lot owes. See what a Form F can actually say.
Form B — Information Certificate. The fuller disclosure: fees, the reserve fund balance, parking and lockers, bylaws, known agreements, litigation, and proposed or approved special levies. This is the document a buyer reads to decide whether to buy.
Other provinces have equivalents — Alberta's estoppel certificate, Ontario's status certificate — selected by the province set on your corporation.
What a Form F can actually say
Section 115 offers exactly three certifications, and no others:
| The certificate states that the owner… | |
|---|---|
| (a) | does not owe money to the strata corporation |
| (b)(i) | does owe money, but it has been paid into court, or to the corporation in trust under s.114 |
| (b)(ii) | does owe money, but arrangements satisfactory to the strata corporation have been made to pay it |
There is no fourth branch, and in particular there is no Form F that states a debt. A certificate reading "the owner owes $1,204.55" is not a Form F, and the Land Title Office will not accept it.
So where a lot is in arrears, ManageStrata will not write one. It tells you the balance and asks which of (b)(i) or (b)(ii) applies — because neither is something your ledger knows. Money paid into court and a payment arrangement both happen outside the books, and guessing either would put a council member's signature under a certification nobody made.
A payment arrangement is a council decision
Branch (b)(ii) says the arrangements are satisfactory to the strata corporation. That is a decision for the council, minuted, before the certificate is issued — not a judgement for whoever is generating the form.
If the lot owes money and neither branch applies, the answer is that no certificate can be issued yet: collect the arrears, or resolve on an arrangement, and then issue one.
How the lot is identified
A Form F identifies the strata lot by its parcel identifier (PID) and legal description, as on title — not by the unit number you use day to day. Both are fields on the lot record; fill them in before a sale, or the certificate goes out incomplete.
It is signed by two council members, or by the manager if the corporation has one, in the prescribed block. And it is current for 60 days from the date of issue (s.115(2)) — a note that prints on the form.
Generating one
Pick the form and the lot
Form B or Form F, and which lot it's for.
Review what's filled in
It's populated from the lot's ledger, the lot register, your fund balances and your corporation details.
Complete the judgement fields
The disclosure questions on Form B aren't in your ledger — see below.
Answer what the system can't
Items the corporation doesn't track read as unanswered, and the page lists them before you print — see below.
Record it, so the fee gets charged
Record this certificate puts the request on the register, starts the statutory clock against it, and charges your fee.
Send it, or print it
Email this certificate sends a branded message with the certificate attached as a PDF and stamps the register. Or print from your browser's print dialog.
Before you issue one
Reconcile the ledger first
A Form F certifies what's owed as at a date, 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 certified a balance is an awkward conversation and, depending on the amount, worse than awkward.
Check, in order:
- Every payment for that lot is recorded, including anything that arrived this week.
- Any correction has been made and the balance reflects it.
- Unpaid special levy instalments are showing.
- The lot's parking, lockers and entitlement are current.
- The corporation name and strata plan number are right — they print on the form.
The Form B disclosure questions
The parts nobody's records fill in automatically, and the parts that matter most:
Legal proceedings and judgments. Any court proceeding, arbitration or tribunal proceeding — including a Civil Resolution Tribunal claim — the corporation is party to, and any outstanding judgment against it.
Proposed or approved special levies. Including one that's been resolved on but not yet issued.
Agreements affecting the lot. Agreements under which the owner takes responsibility for expenses beyond their fee share, and alterations to common property the owner has agreed to assume responsibility for.
Bylaw amendments not yet filed. Passed at a general meeting but not yet registered at the Land Title Office. Easy to overlook and squarely on the form.
Depreciation report status. Whether the corporation has obtained one under s.94, and when.
Form B does not ask about building defects
Disclosure of building defects to a buyer runs through the seller's Property Disclosure Statement, not through a certificate issued by the corporation. The prescribed Form B contains no such question.
That is not a reason to relax. Where a defect has produced litigation, a levy, or an approved-but-uncollected expenditure, the questions above capture it — and leaving those blank is what creates exposure.
Run a red-flag scan before completing Form B
The red flags categories map closely onto exactly these questions — water damage, litigation, levies, deferred work. It's the fastest way to check the corporation's own records for something you should be disclosing.
Non-disclosure is a serious problem
Failing to disclose something the corporation knew about exposes the corporation — and potentially the council personally — to a claim from a buyer who relied on the certificate. If you aren't sure whether something is disclosable, take advice before issuing the form. Do not resolve it by leaving it out.
Items that read as "unanswered"
A prescribed Form B asks several questions ManageStrata has no way to answer: whether the corporation is party to litigation, whether there are bylaw amendments passed but not yet filed, and whether there are outstanding work orders against the property.
Those print as unanswered rather than as "None on record", and the page lists them before you print. The distinction matters: a council member signs underneath, and "None" is an assertion nobody checked, while "unanswered" is an instruction to go and check.
What the system does answer for you, from your own records, includes the fees, the fund balances, and the depreciation report — its date comes from your reserve study, so keep that current.
The contingency reserve figure is reported net
Item (f) asks for the CRF less approved but undrawn expenditures, and that is what prints — not the gross balance. If the number looks lower than your fund balance, an approved expenditure is the reason.
Fees and timing
In BC both the fee and the turnaround are prescribed. They are not a council decision, and there is no statutory rush fee — charging one is common practice and not authorised.
| Certificate | Maximum fee | Deadline |
|---|---|---|
| Form B — Information Certificate | $35, plus reproduction at up to 25¢/page | 1 week from the request |
| Form F — Certificate of Payment | $15 | 1 week from the request |
These are ceilings on the whole certificate including its prescribed attachments: the rules, the current budget, the most recent depreciation report, and — since 1 April 2023 — the summary of the corporation's insurance coverage. Note that the bylaws, financial statements and minutes are not Form B attachments; those are separately requested records under s.36.
Setting what you charge
Strata formsWhat this corporation charges.
The ceiling is the province's; the amount is yours, anywhere from nothing up to it. Most BC corporations charge the maximum, and a self-managed one waiving the fee for its own owners is making a legitimate choice — zero is a valid schedule, not a missing one.
The ceiling itself is never stored against your corporation. It's read from the provincial rules each time a fee is set and again each time one is charged, so a regulation that moves the maximum moves every corporation the same day.
This is income most corporations weren't billing
A 60-lot building turning over five lots a year is a few hundred dollars a year. The Certificate income panel shows what you've collected.
Who pays, and how it's collected
Two routes, chosen per request:
The requester pays — the ordinary conveyancing case. The buyer's notary or conveyancer asked and the buyer's side pays. The money arrives from outside the corporation and is banked to the operating fund as income. No owner ledger is touched, because no owner owes it.
Bill the lot — where the seller ordered the package themselves, or the council decides the fee falls on the owner. It raises an ordinary invoice on that lot's ledger, collected the way any other charge is.
Why a certificate fee is not a strata fee
A lot-billed certificate is invoiced as an other charge, deliberately. A Form B reports the lot's most recent strata-fee invoice as its monthly fee — so a $35 charge booked as a fee would tell the next conveyancer the lot's monthly strata fee is $35.
Pages beyond the certificate
The 25¢-a-page rate is for other records requested under s.36 that happen to arrive in the same envelope. It is not a way to re-bill the certificate's own prescribed attachments — those are inside the $35, however many pages they run to. Enter extra pages only where the requester actually asked for something else.
The certificate register
Strata formsCertificate register.
Every request recorded: who asked, in what capacity, when the request arrived, when it was owed, what was charged, how it was collected, and when it was issued and sent.
It answers the two questions a corporation otherwise can't. "When did we receive that request?" — which is what the one-week clock runs from. And "did we give a certificate to somebody entitled to one?" — which matters because a certificate is owed to an owner, a purchaser, or someone the owner authorised (s.59(2), s.115(1)), and in practice it is nearly always the buyer's notary or conveyancer.
Entries can be amended and are never deleted.
Record the request when it arrives, not when you answer it
The deadline runs from the date of the request, so that is the date the register asks for. Recording it on the day you issue makes every certificate look like it went out same-day, and hides the one that didn't.
Who can generate them
Council and managers only. Owners can't — a certificate is issued by the corporation, and letting an owner produce their own would defeat its purpose.
Keeping a copy
The register records that a certificate was issued and when. For the certificate itself, save a copy to your document library with the lot and date in the name — "Form F — Lot 204 — 2026-05-14". If what was certified is ever questioned, you'll want to know exactly what you said and when.
Common questions
The buyer's lawyer says the balance is wrong. Open the ledger and check for a payment received after you issued it. If the form was wrong, issue a corrected one promptly and say so.
An owner wants their own Form B. They can request it; it's issued by the corporation, at whatever your fee schedule says up to $35, within a week. Record it on the register like any other request.
The lot is in arrears. Then a Form F cannot simply state the debt — see what a Form F can actually say. Either the arrears are collected, or the money goes into court or into trust under s.114, or the council resolves on a payment arrangement it finds satisfactory. Until one of those happens, ManageStrata will decline to write the certificate and tell you why.
We're mid-way through a levy. Disclose the levy, the total, what's been paid on this lot, and what remains. Partial payment is normal; silence about it is not.
Still stuck? Open Support in the top bar of the app, ask the Assistant, or contact us.