Commercial landlords
For a commercial landlord the chain is short: supplier invoice, cost pool, service charge statement, net operating income, valuation. An error at the top flows all the way down.
Strata Contract Assurance
Lenders watch interest cover. Investors watch gross-to-net leakage. Every pound you overpay a supplier lands in one of two places: the service charge cost pool, where your tenants will challenge it, or your own P&L, where it comes straight off net operating income. At a 6% yield, every £1 of lost income is £16 off the valuation.
Two seemingly conflicting duties: to keep the building running, which means paying the FM contractor on time, and to protect net operating income, which means checking every line. In reality, paying on time wins because the lift contractor won’t wait.
Invoices that contradict the agreed schedule of rates, reactive repairs charged at out-of-hours rates when the call-out was in office hours, annual price increases applied despite the contract saying fixed for three years, and many other mischarges slip through the net.
Across tens of thousands of invoices, this can add up to 3% or more of annual spend.
Until now, these contract slippages have been impossible to find before the spend happens.
Strata Contract Assurance catches overcharges before the payment leaves your account, sits on top of your existing accounts payable processes, whether in-house or run by your managing agent, and keeps your cost pools clean before a single tenant sees them. At the same time, dispute packs and pay less notices are auto-generated for your AP team to send out, all the while ensuring clean and compliant invoices are paid rapidly.
Strata Service Charges
The lease is the rule book, whatever language it was written in: what’s recoverable, what’s capped, what’s excluded, how it’s apportioned, and when the budget and the certificate are due. In the UK the RICS Service Charges in Commercial Property standard, second edition, sits on top, mandatory for RICS members and regulated firms since 31 December 2025: budgets a month before the year starts, certified accounts within four months of year end, fixed management fees, and no profit on the service charge. Elsewhere the law adds its own list of what you can recover. Add to that 200 leases negotiated by 200 different lawyers across more than one country, disjointed internal systems and overworked teams trying to compensate, and it’s easy to see how significant errors creep into service charges.
Every pound of recoverable cost you miss comes straight off net operating income. Every pound you recover that the lease didn’t allow comes back as a dispute, usually at lease expiry or sale, with the auditor’s report attached. Your tenants can already hire someone to read their lease against your statement on a no-win, no-fee basis. You can’t. Over-recovering and under-recovering at the same time.
Strata Service Charges reads every lease in the language it was written in, along with your cost pools and rechargeable invoices, and automatically calculates the recoverable charge on a per-lease basis, saving you time, ensuring accuracy, and giving an audit trail on every calculation so you can defend it to the tenant’s auditor years after the statement went out.
See also our Subject Access Requests product (opens in a new window).
See it on your own documents
Book a 30 minute demo and we’ll show you how the platform works with your existing systems and processes.