Getting started
Plinth is a maintenance plan and reserve-fund forecast that stays current. This is the whole method — seven short steps. Print it, forward it to the committee, or keep it beside the app the first time through.
Sign in and you'll land on a worked sample building — poke at anything, it's illustrative. When you're ready, click “New building”, enter the basics (lots, levels, year built) and keep “Pre-fill a recommended register” ticked: Plinth drafts a sensible asset list from the building's age, type and size so you never start from a blank page.
The register is the plan's engine: every long-life asset, what it costs to replace or majorly service, and how often that falls due. Add, edit or delete rows freely — or import your existing schedule as a CSV (there's a template to download), and each figure sharpens the forecast the moment you change it.
Costs can start as honest estimates. The plan is living — refine them as quotes and reports come in.
On the Plan tab enter today's maintenance-fund balance and the current annual levy. That's everything the forecast needs.
Plinth projects the fund year by year against the works schedule and tells you the two numbers a committee actually needs: the year the fund runs short, and the annual levy that keeps it solvent. “Apply recommended levy” shows the fixed plan instantly, and Scenarios compares do-nothing, raise-the-levy and one-off special levy side by side.
When a job comes up, log it in Works, record the quotes you receive, and award on merit. The accepted price replaces the estimate in the forecast — and when the job completes, the real spend is drawn in the right year and the asset's next cycle reschedules automatically. That's what keeps the plan current instead of decaying like a PDF report.
The Compliance, Maintenance, Renewals and Documents tabs hold the statutory obligations, service cadences, insurance/certificate expiries and the document vault — with due dates rolled forward as things are done, and files attached where they belong.
“Download plan” produces the full branded report — funding position, expenditure schedule, register, compliance and recommendations — ready for an AGM agenda. On the Team tab, invite committee members by email: they view the live plan themselves instead of waiting for the next annual PDF.
Plinth’s suggested costs and cycles are indicative planning figures built from published cost data — a sound starting point, not advice. For a production plan, replace the indicative cost basis with a quantity surveyor’s condition assessment as quotes and reports arrive; the forecast recomputes around the real numbers.