Service Charge Management

Service charge is where management is won or lost: money collected from occupiers, spent on their building, and accounted back to them. We run it to the RICS professional standard Service Charges in Commercial Property (2nd edition): budgets issued before the year begins, accounts reconciled and certified after it ends, monies held under RICS client money rules, and never more recovered than the building actually cost.

Like the rest of our Property Management service, it runs on Aivio, the platform we built in-house — and service charge is where that shows most, because the whole year lives in one system: the budget, every demand, every invoice, and the reconciled year end.

The service charge year, end to end

What we do at each stage — and what Aivio is doing underneath:

• Budgets and apportionments — A budget is set for each property and schedule before the year begins, apportioned across units on the basis the leases prescribe. Aivio holds the apportionment for every unit, so a re-measurement or a new letting reworks each share correctly — not by spreadsheet.
• On-account demands — Demands are raised on account at the intervals the leases set, with VAT treated according to the property’s election. Every demand is raised as a draft and approved by a person before it goes anywhere — and when a unit stands empty, its share is billed to the landlord, so occupiers never subsidise a void.
• Expenditure, attributed properly — Supplier invoices are read by the platform and drafted for a person to approve, and every line is attributed to its service charge year — a February invoice for December works lands in the year the cost belongs to, not the year the paper arrived.
• In-year control — Aivio tracks spend against budget through the year and projects the year-end position from contracts and known patterns of cost, so an overrun is a conversation in month six rather than a shock in month thirteen.
• Year-end accounts — The year is closed from reconciled actuals — figures that agree with the bank, not with a spreadsheet. Occupiers receive a certificate and a report, and an underspend is returned as a real credit against the next demand, not quietly absorbed.
• Takeovers — When a building comes to us part-way through a year, we reconcile the outgoing agent’s figures to the penny before we bill anything — opening balances are proved, not assumed.

Service Charge Management sits inside our wider Property Management service, and the same rule runs through all of it: nothing sends itself, and every figure is anchored to the bank.