Body corporate sinking fund forecasts that stay current between AGMs

Every annual general meeting, a Queensland committee puts a sinking fund budget to the owners for adoption by ordinary resolution. The budget is new each year. The forecast underneath it usually is not. In most schemes it traces back to a quantity surveyor's report commissioned some committees ago, rolled forward with a CPI guess or not rolled forward at all.

The building does not wait. A membrane fails early. The painting cycle slips. An inspection pulls a balustrade replacement forward five years. None of it flows back into the forecast, and the gap between what the fund holds and what the next decade will cost widens quietly — until a special levy makes it loud.

The Body Corporate and Community Management Act 1997 sets the framework; the detail lives in the regulation module your scheme is registered under. Section 160 of the Standard Module requires the body corporate to adopt two budgets for each financial year, by ordinary resolution: an administrative fund budget for recurrent costs such as maintenance and insurance, and a sinking fund budget for capital.

The sinking fund budget has to do two jobs at once. It must raise enough for necessary and reasonable capital spending in the current financial year, and it must reserve a proportional share of the money needed for anticipated major expenditure over at least the nine years that follow — painting, the periodic replacement of major capital items, anything else that should reasonably come from capital. Equivalent obligations apply under the Accommodation, Commercial and Small Schemes modules; only two-lot schemes on their own module are excused from formal budgets.

Section 160 carries its own worked example, and it is worth reading closely. A painting job is expected in three years at an estimated $12,000, so the budget reserves a share now. The next year the estimate has risen, and the levy is recalculated. The year after, it has risen again, and the levy moves again. Queensland's legislation does not picture a forecast as a document you commission once and file — it pictures a figure that gets re-priced every budget cycle.

Queensland also leaves the choice of author open. Government guidance is explicit that a body corporate may commission a professional sinking fund forecast but does not have to; a committee is allowed to estimate for itself. Either way the number belongs to the committee — and it is a hard thing to own when it lives in a PDF nobody has touched since the report was signed.

Plinth holds your scheme's capital works as a register: each element with its replacement cost, cycle and condition. Over that register it runs a twenty-year forecast with cost escalation, and it shows the two figures a committee actually needs — the year the sinking fund runs short, and the levy that prevents it. When a quote arrives, a contract is awarded or a variation is approved, the committed spend feeds the forecast directly, so next year's budget starts from what really happened rather than what was predicted.

To be plain about what Plinth is not: it is software, not a statutory report, and not engineering, quantity surveying, legal or financial advice. If your body corporate engages a professional to prepare a forecast, that work still belongs to the professional. Plinth's job is the stretch in between — keeping the plan current from one report, and one committee, to the next. It also stores compliance documents against assets with expiry tracking, so a lapsing certificate shows up before it lapses.

Plinth costs A$750 a year including GST, covering the first building on the account, then A$350 a year for each additional building. Every feature is included at every price and there are no per-seat charges, so a strata manager running a portfolio pays the same way a self-managed body corporate does.

If you want a quick read on your own fund first, the free sinking fund calculator takes six inputs and no sign-up. The worked demo walks through a full scheme, and the guides cover the mechanics in more depth.