How to collect dues in a residents’ association

Start with the list, not the number

Ask most committees how they arrived at the monthly figure and you get a shrug and a reference to last year. That works until somebody puts their hand up at a meeting and asks why it went from 2,000 to 2,500, and then it does not work at all, because nobody wrote down what changed.

Write the list first. Security. Water. Refuse. The gardener. Repairs. Something into the account you do not touch. Put a figure next to each one, add them up, divide by the number of homes. That is your amount, and now every part of it is a line somebody can point at.

The list does more work than the number does. When the security company raises its rate in March, you are not asking anyone to swallow a bigger bill. You are showing them one line that moved and by how much. People argue with a number. They rarely argue with an invoice.

Who pays, and how much each

Equal shares per home is the easiest rule to explain and the easiest to defend at a meeting. In an estate where the houses are much the same, it is also the right one.

Where they are not, people notice. A two-bedroom flat paying the same as a five-bedroom house on a double plot is a conversation that comes back every year until somebody deals with it. The usual answer is to share by size, using floor area or plot ratio agreed once and written into the rules, or to meter the things that can be metered and split the rest.

Whichever you land on, the point is that somebody chose it on a particular day for a particular reason, and that this is recorded. The next committee should inherit a rule. What they usually inherit is a habit nobody can account for.

• —Equal per home — simplest, fine where the houses are similar
• —By size — fairer where they are not, but you need a measure everyone accepts
• —By meter — only for water and power, and only where the meters exist
• —Owner or tenant — decide once, write it down, and say so before anyone signs a lease

Most people who have not paid meant to

It is tempting to treat every unpaid month as a decision. Usually it is not. Somebody opened the message on a matatu, could not remember the paybill, thought they would do it at home, and then it was Thursday and slightly awkward to bring up.

You can convert a good deal of that into money by removing steps. The same payment details, in the same place, every month, without anybody having to ask a person for them. A reference that tells the treasurer who paid without her squinting at a bank statement trying to work out who Kamau J is. A reminder a few days before it is due rather than a fortnight after, while it is still a reminder and not yet a complaint.

Send a receipt, even a small one. Not because anybody doubts where the money went, but because paying into silence feels like paying into a hole, and the second month feels worse than the first.

Nobody should have to chase their neighbour

The worst version of arrears is the one where the treasurer is doing the chasing personally. She sees the man at the gate on Saturday. Their children are in the same class. She has to decide, every time, whether today is the day she says something.

Take that off her. Agree the steps in a general meeting, before there is anyone in particular to apply them to: a reminder after so many days, a written one after so many more, then a conversation with the chair. Then follow it exactly, for everyone, without discretion. Nobody is being singled out if the same thing happens to everybody, and the treasurer is not the one doing it. The process is.

Agree the hardship route in the same meeting, and say out loud that asking for it is normal. Somebody who has lost their job will avoid a demand and will talk to a payment plan. Communities without a route for that do not get fewer hardships. They get people who stop coming to meetings.

One number is never enough

Most associations publish the bank balance and nothing else, and it is the least useful of the three figures they have. It says nothing about what people still owe, and nothing about what has already been committed to a contractor who has not invoiced yet.

Publish what was charged, what has come in, and what has gone out. The gap between the first two is arrears. The gap between the second and third is what you can actually spend. One number on its own invites exactly the questions it cannot answer, which is how a perfectly honest treasurer ends up sounding evasive.

Do not publish who owes what. The total is the community’s business; the names are between that household and the committee. Estates have put lists on the noticeboard and ended friendships over amounts nobody would miss.

The treasurer will move away one day

The expensive failure in association money is almost never theft. It is a careful, honest treasurer who kept everything properly in a spreadsheet on her own laptop, did the job well for four years, and then took a job in Nakuru.

So the test for whatever you use is not whether it works this month. It is whether the next person can open it in two years and see who paid what in 2024, without ringing her to ask. If the answer depends on a particular person still answering their phone, you have notes, not records.