Budgeting

Sound budgeting leads to better management of your property and is essential to controlling an Association's costs. Vision Management assists the Board with preparation of an annual budget and aggressively pursues meeting those budgetary line items throughout the year.

Properly preparing a budget requires understanding the Association's operating expenses, major improvement expenses, and replacement fund needs. For example, to understand day-to-day operating expenses, a maintenance schedule needs developed. To understand more far-reaching aspects of your Association's financial health, the budget should be prepared in a medium term context. That is, to avoid surprise expenditures down the line, multi-year projections or medium term expenditure frameworks should be well integrated, taking into account assessment revenue and financing constraints. Vision Management can assist your Association develop a multi-year component schedule inventorying the estimated remaining useful life of each asset and each asset's replacement cost in today's dollars which; in turn, will substantiate the budget for the funds to be put aside—in reserve—for the replacement of major components of your community's common property. The schedules are presented and reviewed in detail with your Association's Board of Directors and the conclusions reached with the Board become the basis of our Association Management Plan and Budget.

In the draft budget preparation, Vision Management can provide the Board with options, where applicable, and comparative costs. To aid in this endeavor, we can deliver to Board members who are interested, spreadsheets with live data from our accounting software. We can follow up on this and update budget information directly from the spreadsheet back to our accounting software.

After the budget is finalized, Vision Management will track the Association's performance against the budget in its monthly financial reports to the Board of Directors.