Financial & Admin

Where your money lives, in plain view

Trust accounting isn't a feature. It's the whole reason a strata council can sleep at night. Your operating funds and your contingency reserve fund are held in trust, separate from our own money and separate from every other community we manage. That's the law in BC, and it's also just how it should be.

We reconcile those accounts every month against the bank, not once a quarter when something looks off. Every dollar in and every dollar out is coded, dated, and traceable. When your treasurer asks "where did this go?", the answer is one search away, not a week of digging.

For a boutique firm focused on buildings, this is where being small pays off. Your books get looked at by a person who knows your building, not fed into a machine that treats a 40-unit walk-up the same as a 400-unit tower.

What you actually get

Here's the concrete list, not the brochure version.

• Segregated trust accounting for operating and CRF funds, reconciled monthly to the bank.
• Online payments for owners and tenants through the portal — pre-authorized debit, card, or cheque, whatever your community prefers, with automatic receipting.
• Contingency reserve fund tracking with clear running balances, so council always knows what's set aside versus what's spent.
• Annual budget preparation built with your council, mapped line-by-line to last year's actuals so the numbers mean something.
• Form B and Form F orders turned around quickly for owners, realtors, and lawyers during a sale — a bottleneck we take off your plate.
• A searchable document centre holding bylaws, minutes, financials, contracts, and depreciation reports in one place owners can actually find.
• Transparent monthly reporting — an income-and-expense statement, balance sheet, arrears list, and bank reconciliation, delivered on a predictable schedule.

How the reporting works

Every month you get the same package, on time, in a format your council can read without an accounting degree. Income and expenses against budget. What's in the bank versus what the books say. Who's behind on fees and by how much. What the CRF balance is doing.

If a number looks strange, you don't wait for the AGM to ask. Council can pull the underlying transactions in the portal any time, and the Hive AI Assistant can answer routine questions about fees, balances, and forms around the clock. No line item is a black box.

We'd rather over-explain a variance than have you find it yourself and wonder what else you weren't told.

Budgeting and the CRF, done with you

A budget written at your council in a boardroom rarely survives contact with reality. We build yours with you, starting from your actual spending and the quotes in front of you, so the fee increase you propose is one you can defend to owners.

The contingency reserve fund gets the same honesty. We track it clearly and flag when your depreciation report suggests a gap between what you're saving and what the building will need. We won't tell you exactly how much to set aside or quote you a legal threshold off the top of our heads — that's a conversation for your depreciation-report provider and, where money and the Strata Property Act intersect, a strata lawyer or accountant. What we will do is give you numbers clean enough to make that conversation short.

Why this is different at a boutique firm

Big firms are built for volume. Your community's financials get standardized until the reporting is technically correct and completely uninformative. For a small community, that's exactly the wrong trade.

We keep the technology a large firm has — portals, online payments, a real document library, ticket tracking — and pair it with a manager who knows your building by name. You get institutional-grade trust accounting with a human who answers the phone. That combination is the whole point of Onehive, and it shows up most clearly in the money.

Want to see how your current statements would look on our system? Send us your last budget and we'll walk you through it — proposals answered within one business day.

Financial-only management for self-managed stratas

Plenty of small BC stratas self-manage well. Councils that know their building, have the time, and enjoy the work often make better decisions than an outside manager would — and they save the fee.

What self-management reliably struggles with is the money. Trust accounting has statutory requirements, monthly bank reconciliation is a discipline rather than a task, arrears need chasing on a schedule, and Form B and Form F have to be issued accurately and quickly during a sale, usually at the least convenient moment. A treasurer doing this on evenings and weekends is one holiday or one resignation away from a gap in the records.

Financial-only management is the middle path. Your council keeps every decision: bylaws, contractors, meetings, priorities, the lot. We take the trust accounting, the monthly reporting package, the budget build, contingency reserve fund tracking, arrears follow-up and Form B/F issuance. Owners get a portal to pay through and a document library to search, and council gets books that will withstand an owner asking a hard question at the AGM.

It also protects continuity. When the treasurer steps down — and they always do eventually — the corporation's financial history doesn't leave with their laptop.

We've set out the honest trade-offs in self-managed vs professional strata management and financial-only strata management, including the cases where we'd tell you to stay fully self-managed.

Arrears, and what a strata can actually do about them

Unpaid strata fees are the most common financial problem we're brought in to fix, and the most common cause is that nobody wanted to be the one to chase a neighbour.

That reluctance is understandable and expensive. Arrears compound quietly, the shortfall lands on the owners who did pay, and by the time a council is willing to act the amount is large enough to be genuinely hard to recover. Consistency early is what prevents the confrontation later.

The mechanics are well defined. A strata can charge interest on late fees where its bylaws provide for it, and the entitlement to a lien over the strata lot for unpaid strata fees and special levies is a real remedy with a specific procedure. Registered correctly, a lien is generally satisfied on sale. Used carelessly — wrong amounts, missed notice, fines bundled in where they don't belong — it can be challenged, and the corporation ends up worse off than if it had done nothing.

We run arrears on a schedule rather than a mood: a monthly report council can see, reminders at defined intervals, and escalation that begins before the number gets frightening. Where a file genuinely needs a lien or a court proceeding, that is a lawyer's work and we'll say so — our job is to hand them a clean, dated record that makes the file straightforward.

The full picture is in collecting unpaid strata fees.

Frequently asked questions

Can you do just the financials for a self-managed strata? Yes. Many self-managed stratas keep control of decisions but hand us the trust accounting, budgeting, financial reporting and Form B/F issuance.

What is trust accounting? Your strata's funds are held and tracked in a licensed trust account, with transparent monthly reporting — so owners always know exactly where the money is.

Do you prepare the budget and reserve contributions? Yes — we build the operating budget, track the contingency reserve fund, and make sure reserve contributions line up with your depreciation report.