Billing
How to bill service charges fairly (and stop arguing about them)
Residents rarely object to paying. They object to being unable to check what they are paying for.
The dispute is almost never about the amount
When a resident challenges a service charge, the complaint is usually phrased as “this is too high”. Press a little and it becomes “I do not know what this is”. Those are different problems, and only one of them is about money.
An itemised bill — rent, maintenance, water, electricity, parking, each on its own line — ends most of these conversations before they start.
Apportionment: pick a basis and be consistent
Shared costs have to be divided somehow. The common bases are equal shares per unit, share by floor area, or share by unit type. Any of them can be defended. What cannot be defended is changing the basis between months, or applying a different basis to different owners.
Write the basis down, publish it, and apply it the same way every month.
Meter what you can
Where consumption can be measured, measure it. A metered charge invites a different kind of question — “is my reading right?” — which has an answer, rather than “why is my share this much?”, which is an argument.
Tiered rates, where the first block of consumption is cheaper than the last, are worth the effort in buildings where usage varies widely. They also make heavy users visible.
Bill on a predictable day
Irregular billing trains residents to treat bills as negotiable. Billing on the same cycle every month, whether or not the amounts vary, is one of the cheapest improvements available to a managing agent.
Handle the part month properly
A tenant moving in on the thirteenth should pay for the days they occupied, not the whole month — and then fall onto the normal cycle. Getting this wrong at move-in sours a tenancy on day one, over a sum that is usually trivial.
Show the arrears position to yourself, honestly
Ageing matters more than the total. Ninety days of small arrears across many units is a process problem; one large debt at three hundred days is a legal one. They need different responses, and a single “total outstanding” figure hides both.
More guides
Seven practical ways to reduce service charge arrears
Most arrears are not refusals to pay. They are bills that arrived late, unclearly, or with no obvious way to settle them.
Read →A practical handover checklist for new buildings
Handover is the moment a development stops being a cost centre and starts being an operation. Most of the pain comes from things nobody wrote down.
Read →See it against your own building
A short walkthrough using your buildings, your charges and your questions — not a canned demo.