Reserve fund and 10-year plan software for WA strata companies

Western Australia rewrote its strata law with effect from 1 May 2020, and the reserve fund sits near the centre of the rewrite. Section 100 of the Strata Titles Act 1985 requires every strata company to keep an administrative fund for day-to-day expenses. A designated strata company must go further: it must establish a reserve fund — the account the rest of the country tends to call a sinking fund — for major, non-routine expenditure, and hold a 10-year maintenance plan that tells the fund what is coming.

Designation has two doors. A scheme with 10 or more lots walks through the first automatically. The Strata Titles (General) Regulations 2019 open the second: a strata scheme whose building replacement cost exceeds $5 million, or a survey-strata scheme whose common-property improvements would cost more than $5 million to replace, is designated regardless of lot count.

The plan itself is prescribed in detail. The Act requires it to set out the common and personal property anticipated to need non-routine maintenance, repair, renewal or replacement over the decade, with estimated costs; regulation 77 adds the particulars — a list of those covered items, a condition report on them, the method and assumptions behind the cost estimates, and a plan or recommendation for funding the lot. Section 100 then requires revision at least once in each five years, with each revision extending cover to the ten years that follow, and section 102 requires the annual budget to be prepared with the plan in view.

WA's requirements are among the youngest in Australian strata, and the transition shows. Existing schemes did not owe their first plan until their first annual general meeting held more than 12 months after commencement — in practice, meetings held after May 2021. That timing has a consequence arriving right now: a plan approved in 2021 must be revised within five years, so the state's first full revision cycle is falling due through 2026. A committee that treated the first plan as a document to file, rather than a forecast to run, starts the second one no better informed than it started the first.

Designation can also arrive uninvited. Replacement cost is measured as the reasonable cost of rebuilding to an as-new-equivalent standard — a figure that moves with construction prices, not one fixed when the scheme was registered. Costs have climbed hard since 2020, and a building comfortably under the $5 million line at commencement may sit above it today. No notice is served when the threshold is crossed; the obligation simply attaches. For schemes of fewer than 10 lots trading near that line, every insurance revaluation is worth reading twice.

Plinth holds the plan as data, not as a bound document. Each element of common property enters an asset register with its replacement cost, renewal cycle and condition — the same particulars regulation 77 expects a plan to disclose, from roofs and lifts to fire services and car stackers. From that register Plinth builds a 20-year forecast with cost escalation applied year by year, names the year the reserve fund runs short, and calculates the levy that prevents it — the working behind the funding recommendation regulation 77 asks a plan to include, recalculated whenever the inputs change rather than fixed at the date of writing.

Works tracking follows every project from quotes through awarded cost, approved variations and committed spend, so the forecast learns what jobs actually cost. Compliance documents sit against the assets they cover, with expiry dates tracked so nothing lapses quietly.

Plinth is software. It is not engineering, quantity surveying, legal or financial advice, and it is not itself the plan your general meeting approves — the strata company owns that document and votes on it. WA leaves the choice of preparer to the strata company; the regulations ask only that the plan name whoever prepared it — and, where someone is engaged to prepare it, the qualifications, if any, of those involved. Many designated schemes engage a quantity surveyor or building consultant, and for a complex building that is money well spent.

Plinth's work is the stretch between those engagements. When a lift quote lands 40 per cent above the allowance, the register updates, the forecast moves, and the levy answer moves with it — years before a five-yearly revision would have noticed. A plan revised on schedule but never consulted in between meets the section and misses the point.

Plinth costs A$750 per account per year, GST inclusive, which covers the first building, and A$350 a year for each additional building. Every feature comes at every price, with no per-seat charges, so the treasurer, the committee and the strata manager all read the same numbers.

To test the arithmetic first, the free sinking fund calculator at /tools/sinking-fund-calculator takes six inputs and no sign-up, and shows whether current levies carry the building through the next two decades. A worked demonstration is at /demo, and plain-language guides are at /learn. If the calculator's answer is a nearer year than you expected, the register is the next step.