In New Zealand? Visit quarter.nz for body corporates.
Every building is spending down an asset. The roof, the lifts, the membranes, the paint and the plant all have a service life and a replacement cost, and the only question is whether the owners corporation is collecting for them or deferring them. A maintenance plan is how you tell. A plan that is stale, generic or never reviewed does not tell you anything — it just makes the building feel prepared while the gap grows.
The ACT is unusually prescriptive here, and that is an advantage. The Unit Titles (Management) Act 2011 requires a sinking fund plan that estimates the amounts needed each year across a ten-year period, approved for at least the ten years beginning on the first day of the financial year after approval, and reviewed. Because it is statutory, an ACT owners corporation has a clear test: is the plan approved, is it current, and do the levies match it.
Governed by the Unit Titles (Management) Act 2011, administered by Access Canberra.
The Act ties the period to the financial year following approval. Check the dates line up.
In Quarter: Upload the plan you already have and Quarter reads it into a costed schedule of items, lifecycles and due years. From there it projects the fund thirty years out and tells you the annual contribution that actually funds it.
This is the most common ACT failure — a plan that exists, was approved, and has not been looked at since.
They have moved materially since 2020.
In Quarter: Quotes, studies, assessments and correspondence attach to the decision that authorised them, so the file an assessor, an owner or a buyer's solicitor asks for is already assembled.
The Act limits it. Operating expenditure from the sinking fund is a problem.
In Quarter: The plan's required contribution feeds the budget, and approving the budget raises the levies from it — so what owners pay is derived from the plan rather than from last year's number plus a bit.
The plan estimates what is needed each year. The budget should reflect it.
Approval is a formal step, not a filing.
In Quarter: Book the year's meetings once — the AGM and the committee meetings around it — and Quarter carries the notice periods, the agendas and the invitations from there. The insurance renewal and the plan review sit on the same calendar, so the year is visible rather than remembered.
Technically compliant on paper and materially wrong in fact.
The Act restricts what it can fund.
The plan estimates the annual amounts precisely so the levy does not have to be guessed.
Most buildings have something. Far fewer have a plan that reflects the building as it actually is, costed at what work actually costs now, and matched to what the levies actually raise.
A plan is only as good as the maintenance record behind it and the budget in front of it. Quarter connects the three.
What the plan said would happen, and what actually happened. The gap between them is the most useful number a committee has.
Budget from the plan's contribution rate rather than from last year's figure plus a bit.
Where a review is required, it is tracked as an obligation with a date, not a good intention.
Repairs, quotes, invoices and warranties attached to the thing they were for, so the next plan review starts from evidence.
What the fund holds, what the plan says it needs, and the difference — visible, so a levy increase is a conversation rather than an ambush.
General information about Australian Capital Territory, not legal or financial advice for your building. Legislation is amended and grant programmes open and close — check the current position with Access Canberra or the administering body before you act on anything here.
Tell us about your building in Australian Capital Territory and we will show you exactly how Quarter would run it.
