What a committee handover should include

You can hand over a folder and still hand over nothing

Most handovers do transfer the paperwork. The new treasurer gets the accounts. The new chair gets the minutes. Everyone shakes hands and it looks like a handover.

Then in August the water bill comes in high and the new treasurer spends a fortnight on it, because nobody told her there is a leak under the far wall that was found in April and quoted for and never fixed. In September somebody asks why the fence contract went to the expensive one, and there is no answer written anywhere, so the community re-decides it — badly, this time, and in front of the people who did the original work.

That is what gets lost. Not the documents. The reasons behind them, and the half-finished things that only existed in somebody’s head.

The money

This is the part everyone remembers to do and still usually does incompletely. The balance is not the position.

• —Bank access, with the old signatories removed the same day the new ones go on
• —What is owed to the community, by household, and how old each debt is
• —What the community owes — invoices in the drawer, work done and not yet billed
• —Standing payments, what each is for, and when the next one goes out
• —The reserve, and what the community agreed it may and may not be spent on
• —Last year’s accounts and the year before, in something the next person can actually open

The keys, and everything that behaves like a key

This is the part that gets forgotten and then becomes an emergency at nine on a Sunday night. Every item here takes two minutes on handover day and is miserable to recover six months later from somebody who has moved to another town and does not owe you anything.

• —The bank, and who is authorised on it
• —Wherever the community’s documents and photographs live
• —The gate — the guard house, the remote, and whoever can add and remove people from it
• —The phone number and the email address that utilities and contracts send notices to
• —Anything with a password only one person knows, and the real list is always longer than the first list

What the community already promised

A community is not only what it has. It is also everything it has agreed to, and those agreements do not end when the people who made them do.

List the live contracts — security, cleaning, the gardener, waste, insurance — with the end date and the notice period on each one. A contract that renews itself thirty days before anybody thinks to look at it is the standard way a new committee inherits a supplier it would not have picked.

Then list what was approved and has not happened. A repair voted through in March that has not started by June is not finished business. It is something the community promised itself, and quietly dropping it is how a new committee loses the room in its first month.

Why, not just what

Minutes are good at recording what was decided. They are almost never any good at why, and why is the thing that stops the next committee unpicking it.

One line per live decision does it. What was chosen, what it beat, and the thing that settled it. The fence went to the pricier contractor because the cheap quote did not include the gate posts and we had been caught by that before. That takes the outgoing committee an afternoon and saves the next one most of a year.

It protects the people leaving, too. A decision with no recorded reason is exactly the one that gets retold, two years on, as a story about what somebody must have been getting out of it.

The things nobody wrote down

Every committee is carrying a handful of things that are not in any document: the two households who are not speaking and are being kept apart at meetings, the wall that will need real money within two years, the plumber who is honest and always three days late.

None of it is a file, which is why it never gets handed over, and it is the part the next committee needs most. The method is an hour in a room with somebody writing. The only thing that matters is that what gets written survives the afternoon.

The best handover started a year ago

Handover usually gets treated as something you do once there is a new committee to hand over to. By then the outgoing lot have mentally finished and the incoming lot do not yet know what to ask, and everything falls into that gap.

The better question is whether a new treasurer could pick this up on Monday. If the answer today is no, the election did not cause that. It only revealed it.